Murder in Three Acts

I cannot say the same about this film. Poirot dotters about...Hastings is a wimp! Quite frankly, the whole thing put me to sleep. Read the book instead.

Ustinov is great, as always, but the movie is your basic made-for-TV fare. The setting is changed from the novel. I think this really hurt the production. You feel more like your watching an episode of "The Love Boat" than an Agatha Christie mystery. The plot is pretty decent, but it feels as if the cast is just going through the motions. And in my opinion, being that many of the stars just seem to have small parts, I find it's rather easy to spot the murderer. Still, it makes sense and everyone does a decent job with what's there, but I'd def. like to see this remade, esp. with David Suchet. Still, not bad for an afternoon's viewing.

"Murder in Three Acts" starts off rather poorly: the updating of the action to the 80's takes some getting used to, Hastings is portrayed as too much of a buffoon, and even Peter Ustinov himself seems to be hamming it up a bit too much in his first scenes. However, he gets more serious later on, and his climactic verbal reconstruction of the crimes is as delightful as ever - I just love the way he emphasizes certain words. The plot itself is quite clever - it begins with an apparently motiveless murder that turns out to be part of a grander scheme. For a TV movie, "Murder in Three Acts" has rather high production values: the Acapulco locations are beautiful, the houses and the hotels are lavish. But the cast cannot compare with those of Ustinov's theatrical Poirot outings, and most of the characters are very poorly defined. Still, if you are a mystery fan, this one is just about worth having in your collection. (**1/2)

This is a fine movie. Watching Peter Ustinov play Poirot is always a treat. The dialogue between him and Hastings provides adequate humor. And the Agatha Christie whodunit puzzle is fairly good.

The film suffers though when compared to two previous Ustinov films: "Death On The Nile", and "Evil Under The Sun", both of which were grand and stately big-budget theatrical productions. By contrast, "Murder In Three Acts" is a made-for-TV movie, and therefore seems small and cheap. The scenery, the music, and the casting cannot compete.

Further, the suspects in "Murder In Three Acts" seem too "normal"; there are no really eccentric characters. The women especially seem bland and undifferentiated.

Still, if you can avoid the temptation to compare this film to other Hercule Poirot films, as well as Christie's source novel, the movie "Murder In Three Acts" is still entertaining.

Having read all of the Agatha Christie books, I have to say that David Suchet was the ultimate Hercule Poirot as written by Agatha Christie. But my favorite Poirot, having nothing whatsoever to do with either Poirot or what Ms. Christie wrote, is Peter Ustinov. It always reminds me of what someone once said about Zero Mostel in "Fiddler on the Roof" - "He's fabulous...but what he does has nothing to do with Fiddler." Ustinov is a sheer delight in every way - he's funny, he's charming, he's warm, he's relaxed - all things that, frankly, Agatha's Hercule just wasn't.

"Murder in Three Acts" is a slapped together TV movie without the usual star power except for Tony Curtis and several TV actors - the gorgeous Emma Samms, who was a big TV star in the '80s, Diana Muldaur, Concetta Tomei, Dana Elcar, Nicholas Pryor, and several others. The characters have been Americanized, and though set in Acapulco, aside from a few exterior shots, you don't get much atmosphere.

Though the story is very interesting (it is, after all, based on an Agatha Christie novel), the production has a certain blandness to it. You know there's a problem when Diana Muldaur announces that she and the Tony Curtis character did "Private Lives" together. Now, I happen to be very fond of Tony Curtis - I did research for his autobiography, he's on the cover of a book I wrote, I found him a very charming man - but come on, PRIVATE LIVES? With that New York accent? I don't think so. He does, however, look really fabulous, and if you watch the scenes in his house carefully, you'll catch some fantastic photos of him on the wall.

It's an okay way to pass the time, and the plot is intriguing, Tony's Tony, Emma's beautiful and sexy, Nicholas Pryor is funny, and Ustinov is - well, he's Poirot even if he's not what Dame Agatha had in mind.