Agatha Christie: delitto in tre atti

Agatha Christie's Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot and his ever faithful Tonto like companion Captain Hastings are in Acapulco for Murder In Three Acts. As you gather by the title their are three murders, but their connection to each other is in some cases non-existent and to the murderer they are known in varying degrees of acquaintanceship.

The first is of a clergyman Philip Guilmant at a cocktail party given by retired expatriate actor Tony Curtis when a lethal cocktail is given the victim. At another cocktail party with a different setting the same happens to Dr. Dana Elcar. Lastly a poor catatonic woman in an asylum is slipped a box of chocolates laced with the same poison. The old switch is used like in many a magician's act.

Peter Ustinov as Poirot is present at the first and that was the perpetrator's fatal mistake. As Dana Elcar says all too prophetically for him, crime seems to follow him around.

Agatha Christie purists will object to the way poor Jonathan Cecil is treated like such a boob. He's not in the David Suchet BBC series. It's very much like Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson who slowly became a befuddled idiot in the Universal Sherlock Holmes movies.

Still the film is all right not up to the standard of Ustinov big screen Hercule Poirot films. And the murderer when revealed truly steals the film.

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This features a top row performance contributed by Tony Curtis, and was the second Poirot movie I found to feature the inner-inner circle of Hollywood big-wigs, and their sycophantic hangers-on. This time in Acapulco, we are given "movie stars, martinis, and murder." I found this highly entertaining, though it was mildly difficult to solve.

Breathtaking vistas, another all-star cast, and fine direction by Gary Nelson (Get Smart, Get Smart Again, and Alan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, to name but a few), make worthy contributions to this wonderful adaptation of a great Agatha Christie mystery.

All in all? This was not rated, but made for television in 1986, so I think I can safely say it is suitable for all audiences. Great Sunday afternoon/rainy day fare.

It rates a 6.7/10 from...

the Fiend :.

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.

"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)

Watching a less-engaging Agatha Christie movie adaptation is like watching an extended episode of Murder, She Wrote. Like Hercule Poirot, Jessica Fletcher is a walking crime magnet, making you wonder if the world wouldn't be a safer place for the rest of us if people like them were put away for good.

Agatha Christie movies often host a potpourri of stars to be the suspects. Sometimes they're a mix of renowned actors, like Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Ingrid Bergman et al, in 1974's Murder on the Orient Express; and sometimes, like in Murder in Three Acts, they're a mix of actors you vaguely recall seeing on some TV show or other, like Emma Samms from Dynasty and Diana Muldaur from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Though the former makes for a more attractive package, even when they're the latter, they usually still turn out to be decent viewing, as this movie is.