The Agatha Christie Collection (12) |Home Ents Review
Dir. Various, UK/US, 1974-82, 470 mins plus extras, in English
Cast: Peter Ustinov, Angela Lansbury, Albert Finney
Review by Colin Dibben
This 4K UHD and Blu-ray set includes: Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Death on the Nile (1978), The Mirror Crack’d (1980) and Evil Under The Sun (1982).
The ‘supporting’ stars on show include: Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Jane Birkin, Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, David Niven, James Mason, Diana Rigg, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Geraldine Chaplin, Tony Curtis, Edward Fox, Jacqueline Bisset, Jon Finch and Michael York.
They all seem to be having a lot of fun and the fun is infectious.
Even if Albert Finney’s performance as Hercule Poirot in Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express is insistently contentious – in my household anyway – I think this is the best film, with a tense and wintry, dark and brooding mood that is never overpowered by the thesps doing their thing.
All 3 other films are in a more comic mode and perhaps flatten out as the series proceeds. Surely the only proper set piece in the films is the tense trip around the Temple of Karnak in Death on the Nile, in which director John Guillermin seems to be paying homage to the final sequence of Antonioni’s L’eclisse.
Surprisingly, not everyone involved is chewing the scenery. Although, if that is your thing, I commend to you Finney’s Poirot, Lansbury’s Mrs. Otterbourne in Death on the Nile, Novak’s actress in The Mirror Crack’d and Diana Rigg in Evil Under the Sun.
But even the overacting is pretty engaging.
The 4-disc boxset features a 64-page booklet plus 4 posters of brand-new artwork. The films are also available individually in both formats.
This would make a nice present for someone, although when films are this well-known and beloved, this set surely constitutes the superfluous end of the re-release market?
