Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

The idea behind this film seems to have been "how bad can we mess up an Agatha Christie mystery?" If that was the goal, it's been a runaway success. Otherwise, it's closer to Clouseau than anything Dame Agatha wrote. Tony Randall, usually an amusing second banana, can't seem to come up with an accent for Hercule Poirot, let alone a characterization. Robert Morley as Hastings is a buffoon. Worst of all, Ms.Christie's ingenious plot is totally lost in all of the comic conniptions. Through most of the film, Poirot comes off as a muddle-headed incompetent.It's no wonder that Dame Agatha was literally aghast when she saw "The Alphabet Murders" and gave up letting her work be filmed for a while. Okay, it wasn't dull. But if you enjoy Agatha Christie -- and quite a few of us do -- that's the best you can say for it.

Most cinematic or television adaptations of Agatha Christie's crime fiction are serious in intention, remaining faithful to the spirit of her work even if the details of her plots are sometimes altered. "The Alphabet Murders", unusually, is ostensibly based on the plot of a Christie novel but treats it as a comedy. The film is little-known today; indeed, I had never heard of it until I recently caught it on television. It features one of Christie's two best-known characters, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. (The other one, Miss Marple, makes a brief cameo appearance in the person of Margaret Rutherford).Poirot is confronted by a serial killer who appears to be working his, or her, way through the alphabet; the first victim is named Albert Aachen, the second Betty Barnard, and so on. The most likely suspect is a young woman named Amanda Beatrice Cross, with the significant initials ABC, who appears to have mental health issues; Poirot has to decide whether Amanda really is the killer and, if so, whether someone else is manipulating her. There is also a running joke about Rufus Hastings, a British Foreign Office official, who is continually trying to persuade Poirot to leave the country for his own safety, and Poirot's refusal to do so. (In the original novels Poirot had a sidekick named Hastings, the Watson to his Holmes, but his Christian name was Arthur and he did not work for the Foreign Office).When the film was recently shown on television, the reviewer for one newspaper compared it to a mixture of Agatha Christie and a Carry On film. There is some truth in that comparison, as the Carry On films, when they were not relying on bawdiness, obtained a lot of their humour from parodying other films or film genres. ("Carry On Cowboy", for example, sends up the Western, long before Mel Brooks had that particular idea). The idea of parodying the Christie-style whodunit is in itself a good one; the genre is, after all, a hidebound, formulaic one which offers plenty of targets to the satirist. Unfortunately, "The Alphabet Murders" just does not work as a comedy.Besides the "Carry On" films an obvious influence on the film was Blake Edwards's "The Pink Panther" from a couple of years earlier. The film-makers seem to have conceived Poirot, another Francophone detective, as the equivalent of Peter Sellers's Inspector Clouseau, and the part was originally intended for the American comedian Zero Mostel. Unfortunately, Mostel was unable to take the part which went to Tony Randall who, on this evidence, does not appear to have shared Sellers's comedic talents. Admittedly, he receives little assistance from a singularly unfunny script and is reduced to repeating catch-phrases like "leetle grey cells" in a foreign accent in an attempt to raise laughs. One might have thought that Robert Morley, who often played pompous, self-satisfied characters, might have made something of the pompous, self-satisfied bureaucrat Hastings, but even he does not contribute much.The film does not work either as a murder mystery or as a comedy; it is too silly, and the plot too confusing and difficult to follow, for it to succeed as the former, and the attempts at humour too leaden for it to succeed as the latter. The obscurity into which it has fallen since 1965 is well-deserved. It is notable that subsequent actors to play Poirot, such as Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov in films from the seventies and eighties, and David Suchet in the more recent television series, have taken the character more seriously. 2/10

"The alphabet murders" (1965) directed by Frank Tashlin as comedy from a novel of Aghata Christie is also with a comic style of marching on the streets from the main character, who accompanied the Londonian adventure and in an ironic scene for instance the Turkish baths are epicenter of a plot to kill Poirot by a nymph. In which the dramatic situation inside remembers a slapstick of incapacity for the potential capability of the plot, as ugly made in it. Another scene also gave us Miss Marple for a momentous short while, apparently in a wrongly entry at the police station, when just in this moment detective Poirot is just crossing ways with her own path, but coming out without a too much kind of such usual turn back and traditional good acquaintance. Only in a static and phlegmatic way of suspicious neutrality and her quite mistrusting this coincidence as also concurrence in a given troubled lady vanishing fake affair, the nymph of the bath, as she snubbing him on the entry stairs at metropolitan police.Tashlin made almost a mechanical option of the small things and tricks of everyday, on a daily chronicle of domestic and urban high criminality, with some private and public jokes in an old and innovative style of comic direction, near the satyr of academic's policy and concerning protection for such an imperial civility before stupidity of that time. The edited way of these small episodes and sketches in this story of the movie is of a great liability as well as its decoration mainly in interiors by night, namely in the party where hooliganism before the letter and embarrassment for such a luxury and eroticism as smell of the status there.

Being one of the more elusive films this side of the pond, The Alphabet Murders delivers no more or less than expected (hence the 5/10). But I think you have to ask yourself why your watching it before you condemn it. Christie purists are up in arms, Randall fans defend him, yadda yadda yadda. Personally, I got it for the all too brief Dame Margaret. That said, there's little else to say about it.Tony Randal is an acquired taste as Poirot, almost getting up your nose with an abysmal accent and acting as if he's the only one with grey cells, and overdoing that. The constant referring of him as a 'short' Belgian is the biggest mystery, as he's taller than most in the film. Poor Robert Morley tries his best, but the tedium of the film mainly comes from the rather repetitive score. Plotwise it doesn't really test the viewer, but enough is happening to keep you guessing. 30 seconds of Margaret Rutherford and spouse puts a much needed grin on the face, but it's not enough by far. Certainly one to add to the collection, but don't rush for it at the garage sale. Overall, a huge waste of talent. Pity.Oh, and a reviewer thinks Finney's Poirot was a masterpiece? Yeah. Right.