Gone-Dead Train

By JAY COCKS

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

Directed by SIDNEY LUMET Screenplay by PAUL DEHN

They got Albert Finney to play Hercule Poirot. They also got, in alphabetical order as protocol dictates, Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Richard Widmark and Michael York, all as murder suspects. And still they got nothing.

This windy movie is an adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's alltime best-selling chestnuts (called Murder in the Calais Coach in America). The setup is simply that a killing is committed aboard the Orient Express, snowbound in the Yugoslav countryside. The victim is a rather sour American businessman of the usual mysterious origins.

Falling under the suspicion of the eccentric and generally insufferable sleuth Poirot is practically everyone else aboard the coach--twelve to be exact, a number that will assume unlikely significance before the piece is played out.

There are only two ways to mount a project like this: for gilded fun, which is fair enough, or for serious suspense, which is perilous, considering the mechanics of the plot. Director Sidney Lumet tries to avoid the problem in typical fashion--by getting around it. He tries to make the pasteboard characterizations more winning, if hardly more real, by casting luminaries in the roles.

The idea is that everything will be more interesting if Sean Connery or Ingrid Bergman, rather than the characters they play, is suspected of having committed the foul deed. The device does not work, despite the occasionally droll efforts of most of the cast, among whom Connery, Bergman. Redgrave and Widmark are the most effective. Everyone seems to have had a good time lurking about in the Calais coach in his posh 1930s duds. But the amusement is a little offputting. It is like watching a few people enjoy themselves at a party that hardly anyone else can bear.

A word or two about Albert Finney's curious performance. In trying to flesh out Christie's classic caricature, he has slicked down his hair, altered his voice to a sort of petulant croak and overacted stylishly, if not always enjoyably. Ironically, what works best for him are his eyes. They escape the whim of makeup and never play him false. Finney fills them with irony and cunning in a struggle against all the shabby artifice that surrounds his face and smothers this hapless film.

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