Lord Edgware Dies

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?

During the early to mid-1930s, Austin Trevor played Hercule Poirot in several films. Seeing them now, it seems strange as Trevor was very tall...yet in the books, Poirot was 5'4"! He also doesn't look much like modern interpretations of Poirot, as he's missing the moustache and style of the great Belgian detective. Oddly, Poirot's partner in the story, the Captain, DOES look much like Poirot from the Agatha Christie novels! This is a big strike against "Lord Edgware Dies" from the onset.

Lady Edgware is a vain and narcissistic woman. She approaches Poirot and asks that she intercede on her behalf with her estranged husband. According to her, her husband refuses to grant her a divorce...and she says she hopes Poirot can convince him. Oddly, however, Poirot meets with the man and he's more than happy to grant her the divorce...which confuses Poirot. A short time later, Lord Edgware is found dead...stabbed. What's really going on here?!

Overall, this is a pretty lifeless installment of the Agatha Christie series....low in energy and curiously uninvolving. Not terrible but also not particularly good.

While certainly not a good movie, Lord Edgeware Dies does have a few good things in it. Number one is Jane Carr as the blithe blonde Lady Edgeware, who brings a lot of fun to her role and gets the film's final, comical line.

Then there's Christie's mystery, which the movie does a pretty good job of laying out, even if the short length means clues are discovered and explained at a somewhat breathless pace.

On the other hand, this is talky and staticly filmed, and while it sometimes rushes, other times it drags. Austin Trevor's Poirot is simply a rather conventional detective without much personality, giving the whole thing a rather generic feel.

Overall, not worth watching, even for a movie this old.

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 reviews are,by and large,unfair. It was the early thirties and one should not ask for Finney's and Ustinov's movies or Suchet's TV series.

This is one of Christie's best books,in a golden decade ("the ABC murders ", " death on the nile " "death in the clouds","murder on the orient express ", 'the Tuesday club murders" ,ending with her triumph "and then were none" );if my memory serves me well , it's one sentence which makes the little gray cells discover the whole truth .

Written in 1933 ,the year before, it is anyway interesting for Christie's fans to see early movies based on her books;although not as good as "love from a stranger"(based on the short story "Philomel Cottage ), "lord Edgware dies " , it is ,for the time, an interesting adaptation.

Trevor may not physically be Poirot (no moustache,tall and not bald) ,but it's false to write there is no hint at Belgian :he has an accent and one can hear many French words in the dialog ( "mon cher ami" "mon Dieu",etc ) Hastings serves as a foil to him (it's his dr Watson),and when he hears that Lady Edgware might be a potential criminal, his tea goes down the wrong way .

Christie's fans should try and watch "the ninth guest" ,released the very same year ,not from one of her books, but contains the seeds of "and then there were none" .