Thanks for the memories!

Beautiful, moving film.

A Disappointing Continuation

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Agatha Christie's Appointment With Death is not her best book, but is well crafted and a pleasant read. This adaptation isn't terrible, but it is the weakest of Peter Ustinov's outings as Poirot. Speaking of Ustinov, he is excellent here, I had no problem with him. And Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher, Jenny Seagrove and John Gielgud give fine support. The film does have some splendid locations, even if Petra was changed to Jerusalem if I remember rightly, and the music was good too. However, the script isn't that polished, a lot is changed from the book and some of the changes are underdeveloped, the character of Hassan was unnecessary. But my main gripe with the movie was the character of Mrs Boynton. The same applies for the recent David Suchet version(which was more unfaithful but better musically and visually, and the acting was more solid in that one too), the character of Mrs Boynton was never done quite right, despite the wholly hateable portrayal given by Piper Laurie. In the book, she is a bit of a tyrant, in the adaptation, she was portrayed as nasty and cantankerous, but lacked the depth of the character in the book. Overall, not bad, but I did think Death on the Nile and Evil Under The Sun were better. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Appointment with Death was the last theatrical release of that series of Hercule Poirot mysteries. I'm sure Peter Ustinov probably could have done others. I wouldn't be surprised if in fact the BBC Poirot series starring David Suchet which we in America saw for many years may have killed the more expensive budgeted big screen Poirot that Ustinov did so well.This particular mystery finds Hercule Poirot on holiday and in the company both on ship and later in British mandated Palestine in the mid Thirties of an American family headed by a tyrannical stepmother played by Piper Laurie. She has one grown daughter and three stepchildren one of whom is married. All live with her and the terms of her late husband's will give her complete control of the family fortune. The power of the purse keeps the whole family under her thumb. Laurie's come a long way since she was a matron in a women's prison.Another woman along on the trip who's come along way is a character based on Lady Nancy Astor, an American born woman who married a title and now has a seat in Parliament played by Lauren Bacall. She's traveling with a companion played by Hailey Mills. Also along on the trip is David Soul, Laurie's family attorney and Jenny Seagrove as a young doctor. On an excursion out in the desert Laurie turns up dead and the mystery is afoot. Of course Poirot through careful questioning and a gathering of the suspects eventually finds out who the real murderer is.The film has of course an impressive cast which also includes John Gielgud as the local police inspector in Jerusalem. A young Arab boy also dies during the film, killed because he witnessed the murder and can identify the culprit. That particular act robs us of any sympathy we might have had for the perpetrator.Appointment with Death also benefits from good photography, shot on location in both Israel and Italy with interiors done in London. All the Peter Ustinov Poirot films are of excellent quality and are a great introduction to the work Agatha Christie.

When her husband dies Emily Boynton cannot accept that her husband had written a second will splitting his fortune among all his children. She blackmails their lawyer to destroy the second will and only use the original that leaves the whole estate to her. Her children are fuming but can prove nothing and accompany her on a holiday around Europe. It is during this trip that the noisy family come together with a collection of other guest on a cruise – including the famous Hercule Poirot among the passengers. During the trip she is murdered and the British Officer in the region turns to Poirot for help in identifying the killer.I generally like mystery films and as such I welcomed the chance to see this Agatha Christie film with a starry cast and the idea that it was directed by the dread Michael Winner was only a minor worry for me. At the start I thought everything would be fine because it looked polished and expensive and I knew the starry cast would help it. However what I didn't realise was that the film would be delivered in a very slow fashion with no real intrigue or mystery built up and very little to really engage the viewer. It all goes through the genre motions of course but for all his beautiful sets and lavish locations, Winner has forgotten to inject tension and pace into the delivery.The cast are all fairly impressive on paper but they are surprisingly lacking on the screen. Ustinov seems a bit bored by the whole affair and he offers little to suggest a sharp mind inside – he sounds like a man reading his lines. Bacall is lively and Gielgud is a nice sidekick to Ustinov but other than that the rest of the cast are quite forgettable – indeed were it not for the fact that Fisher and Soul are so familiar then I would have likely not been able to keep track of who was who. This isn't helped by the lacklustre material but they don't really help themselves with their performances.Overall, genre fans may find enough in here to satisfy their needs but I imagine many viewers will be surprised by how uninvolving the mystery is and how dull parts of it are. Winner's direction is OK but he can't get any pace into it and his choice of music doesn't help at all. There are better detective mysteries out there than this half-baked affair.

Michael Winner is listed as one of the writers of this clumsy attempt to tell a Poirot story. I wonder which bits he wrote - I bet it's those bits where the logic of the story started to disintegrate, and he shoved in putty to hide the cracks. Did, for example, Jenny Seagrove mean to put on her brooch upside down - leaving Poirot to point out the mistake at the end of scene? Or did Winner see the mistake at the last minute, and added the Poirot line to save several minutes of film? Poirot spots the drink on board was poisoned, because the roaches that rush out to sip the spillages drop dead. Pretty high-class cruise - I don't think! A cruise ship with cockroaches as dinner companions aptly sums up this film. A sledgehammer cracking a nut can be heard in the background.3 out of 10 because it's Agatha Christie.