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.

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.

I love Agatha Christie stories, she was an excellent writer no matter what people think or say. I read her entire work. But I think casting-wise Hastings should have been Piorot and Poirot should have been Hastings but that's just my opinion, watch it and see if you like it. One of the earliest versions of Agatha Christie as far as I know.

If you forget that this is supposed to be the short, bald, mustachioed Hercule Poirot of the Agatha Christie books, this is actually a pretty good old British mystery. Some of the performances are a bit off - Trevor's French accent (no indication that Poirot is Belgian here) is overdone, Hastings is annoyingly stupid and clumsy, and the acting of the minor roles is amateurish - but Jane Carr is lively and lovely, and the Inspector is British stolidity at its best. The staging is awkward at times, but the direction moves things along nicely. Enjoyable on its own merits, but maybe not for diehard Christie fans.

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?