THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
OLDIES GOOD AND BAD THE SCREEN The beginning of A Tale of Two Cities states the case perfectly: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of...
...Her characters are the random assortment of travelers one would expect to find boarding the Orient Express in a novel: a ruthless American tycoon (Richard Widmark), his nervous secretary (Anthony Perkins) and prissy valet (John Gielgud), a loud-mouthed American divorcee (Lauren Bacall) and a mousy, simple-minded evangelist (Ingrid Bergman), a hot-tempered Czech aristocrat and his wife (Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset), a bad-tempered Scottish colonial officer and his mistress (Sean Connery and Vanessa Redgrave), a haughty Duchess (Wendy Hiller), et al...
...They were too ready to see through the self-importance of their times, and so deprived us of that one pleasure we insist upon even when all others fail-the pleasure of seeing through the inadequacies of past eras ourselves...
...From this beginning Poirot becomes a sort of Midas whose investigations, undertaken when one of the passengers is murdered, uncover an unsuspected humanity in all the survivors...
...Looking back at an earlier era in order to write a novel about it, Dickens realized that to succeed he must acknowledge the remarkable ambivalence we all have toward the past...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...We've heard it all before...
...In the closing scene, as Hildy and his financee depart to get married, Burns is still hard at it doing what he was doing in the opening scene: trying to split the happy couple up...
...When it is finally time in a flashback to recreate the murder, a cold-blooded infliction of multiple stab wounds, Lumet doesn't even allow the victim himself to come into camera range...
...The Front Page is just like Murder on the Orient Express not only in having essentially a one-room set, but in relying on a company of stock characters who do repartee to entertain us...
...Beyond the sheer exhaustion of the play, however, the trouble is that Hecht and Mac-Arthur were too clever by half...
...While they were not great enough playwrights to create a work for all seasons, they were also not dull enough to create only class kitsch either...
...It is something lost forever that we want to get back in touch with for two contradictory reasons: so we can see how silly it was and feel superior, so we can see how wonderful it was and feel envious...
...On the other hand, when one of these movies does allow us both to rise above the past and, at the same time, to sink into it, we couldn't be more delighted...
...Since the repartee isn't leading anywhere, it is supposed to be sharp enough by itself to sustain the play...
...Quite aside from any merit an old property being made into a new movie may have in its own right, it had better answer to these anxieties we have about the relationship of past to present...
...It is at once the object of both our contempt and our nostalgia...
...In all fairness to Lumet and Wilder, the quality of their films results less from anything they have done than from the qualities that inhere in the classics they are adapting...
...Having failed to give us great characters, they also failed to let us see for ourselves the smallness of the characters they were giving us...
...Since both Wilder and Lumet are pretty faithful to the story, format and characterizations of the originals from which they are working, neither of them needs be praised or blamed too much for the results...
...But it doesn't somehow...
...The one original among them, though, is of course Dame Christie's detective, Hercule Poirot (Albert Fin-ney...
...It's all been just the same for almost two hours at this point-two hours of relentless incorrigibility...
...OLDIES GOOD AND BAD THE SCREEN The beginning of A Tale of Two Cities states the case perfectly: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness...
...What comfort can we take in having our special vantage point when the men who lived in the age could see its folly for themselves...
...What Dame Christie's story does is to isolate some stock characters-characters who must already have been a nearly extinct breed, a social set of cliches, when she wrote the novel-and then gradually, surprisingly, to bring each of them back to life for us...
...But between the character touches provided by the novel-such as a glimpse of Poirot's bedtime ritual with creams and hairnets-and the performance by Finney, Poirot is soon rendered human and rather endearing in inconsequential ways...
...When miscalculating producers revive a period piece whose appeal isn't appropriately two-sided-or perhaps, less kindly, two-faced-the result is bound to fail...
...They're a deliciously dislikable lot...
...Almost all of Murder on the Orient Express takes place on three cars of that famous train as it lies snowbound in the mountains of central Europe, and much of The Front Page is confined to even tighter quarters, the press room in the Chicago Criminal Courts Building...
...What Dame Christie has written is in fact not so much a mystery as a revenge tragedy of extraordinary dimensions...
...Same old Hildy...
...Like the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play that Wilder is dealing with, Lumet's Agatha Christie novel is essentially a one-set show...
...This is what happens with Billy Wilder's new film of the 1928 hit play The Front Page...
...They work hand-in-glove on this case, he to reveal the guilty parties and she to exonerate them...
...We demand above all else that we be made to feel both scorn and longing equally...
...Their play doesn't offer us in revival the kind of relationship with the past that we want...
...Poirot's is a singularly cerebral world...
...Present realities are always such a maddening combination of these two possibilities that the only reassurance the past can give us is to have been the same...
...He solves the crime purely by the examination of motives and emotions, and Lumet falls under the power of his deductions...
...Where the whole point in Murder on the Orient Express is for the characters to change for us and surprise us with their capacity to grow in our estimation, the point here is for the characters to stay just the same at all times...
...He seems to sense how inappropriate that would be after Poirot has concentrated so hard on the fineness of the murderers' guilt rather than the haplessness of the victim...
...At first his fastidiousness makes him seem almost as disagreeable as the rest...
...Both directors have done their adaptations in a very straightforward fashion...
...In the center stage are ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Jack Lemmon) and his editor Walter Burns (Walter Matthau), and surrounding them with its commentary is the rest of the press corps, an assemblage that falls somewhere between a tragic chorus and a barber-shop quartet...
...What the current crop of movie reruns, remakes and revivals also needs to succeed is just this appeal which Dickens created for the historical novel...
...While Dame Christie waited forty years before selling the movie rights to her book to anyone, this is the third time The Front Page has been made into a movie...
...This is what happens with Sidney Lumet's new film of Agatha Christie's early 1930s mystery, Murder on the Orient Express...
...It's just worn out, that's all...
...She and her Poirot are obviously very like-minded people...
...Same old Burnsie...
...He plays his script as straight, dramatic dialogue and imposes no inappropriate action scenes on it...
...It wasn't that substantial a work to begin with...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 12
