Lord Edgware Dies

Austin Trevor stars as an atypical Hercule Poirot in "Lord Edgware Dies" from 1934.

There was a tv film starring Peter Ustinov and Faye Dunaway titled "Thirteen at Dinner."

In 2000, the Hercule Poirot series featured the story, starring David Suchet as Poirot.

Poirot endeavors to figure out how Lady Edgware killed Lord Edgware while she was at a dinner party. Two other murders follow the first.

In this film, Poirot - tall, slender, and unmoustached doesn't correct those who think he's French.

Passable and interesting. Not as detailed in the plot as Thirteen at Dinner. Still, it's a good story.

I was pleased to catch up with this early adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1933 Poirot story because of the authentic period feel. They were quick to film this only a year after the story's original publication so the contemporary 1930s situation involved is hot off the press so to speak. What was a culture shock for me was the somewhat switcheroo of the Poirot and Hastings I'm used to seeing in the David Suchet TV series. In this film Poirot is tall while Hastings is the short and fussy one which is a most direct contrast to how the characters are seen in Suchet style. The Suchet version being more faithful to Agatha Christie's creations in that respect.

Lady Edgware approaches Poirot to persuade her husband to grant her a divorce only for Poirot to find Lord Edgware had already granted it via a letter which must have been intercepted. Lord Edgware is murdered in his library quickly followed by the death of another character which would appear to be suicide. Lady Edgware has an alibi as she has been witnessed at a dinner in Chiswick at the time of the murder. But staff at Lord Edgware's mansion say they saw her there at that time and so Poirot has to discover which of these set of witnesses are correct.

Even though this film has to lose a lot of Christie's original plot elaborations to fit a B-mystery running time I think the film tells the story well. The vanity of Lady Edgware's American actress character is so good to see and she has some great lines to deliver. She complains that she could have had her husband bumped off much more easily if she had been back home in Chicago. And she takes to wearing black because it was so fetching at her husband's funeral saying "black is very effective against white marble." I would say this is an enjoyable adaptation for fans of murder mysteries of the cozy English variety.

The beautiful Lady Edgware asks Poirot to help her get rid of her husband, soon after her plea, he's found dead, stabbed in the neck, but she has an alibi.

I think it's easy to overlook that this was made back in 1934, I'm watching this almost eighty years on, and for the most part it's well made, competently acted, and actually pretty accurate, the likeness from the original text that is.

It's atmospheric, it flows well, I actually liked the staging. I felt that they captured the tone of the book, and as for the killer, I felt that they got them, and their motives spot on, not too sympathetic, but devious and cunning.

On the downside, the accents are enough to make Rene Artois blush, they are hilariously bad, Poirot sounds a little comical, Lady Edgware is inconsistent let's say, sadly the character of Hastings is an utter fool. Poirot, has no moustache, and isn't Belgian, I can imagine Christie had a few words to say about that.

I'd love to see this get a commercial release.

7/10.

The earliest Hercule Poirot screen apperance available for us to see (Austin Trevor had already played the role twice before, but those films are lost - forever?). It's a more enjoyable film than you might expect: it moves relatively well, the plot has the classic Agatha Christie switcheroo (although the finale is very rushed), Hastings and Japp are bumbling but what else is new, and Trevor himself as Poirot is amusing and doesn't take the part overly seriously; his French accent definitely sounds like Clouseau to modern ears, but at the time it probably passed muster. Overall, the film certainly has a place in my extensive Agatha Christie collection. **1/2 out of 4.

Lady Edgeware, played by Jane Carr, is a Hollywood actress married to C. V. France. She wants a divorce, and hires Hercule Poirot, played by Austin Trevor, in his third go-around as Agatha Christie's detective. The next day, France is stabbed to death. As long as he's there, Poirot uses his little grey cells to solve the murder.

It's a cheap version of the novel, with acting honors to Richard Cooper as Hastings, largely for his ability to save a shot by turning an error, like catching his umbrella handle on a door, into a minor comic bit. The rest of it is almost uninterrupted talk, as Trevor asks seemingly irrelevant questions.

My issue with Agatha Christie is this: she could plot the heck out of a mystery, playing endlessly with the bits of the classic British form, but she couldn't write very well. Her characters are all stock types; Poirot, for example, is Belgian - called French here - because this would permit her to indulge in a few pat phrases to stand in for an actual character. Being Continental, he didn't matter. Her Americans are standard British Stage characters, yokels with money or dumb and predatory women. Her choice of words is repetitious.

Ah, but her plots, her machinations with locked rooms and impossible murderers! That's where she excelled. And that would be the case here, were it not that the film is structured so that there is a severely limited number of suspects, and Poirot simply has to eliminate them. When he points the finger, will the criminal admit it's a fair cop? Probably. That's what the English do, isn't it?