MUDDLE ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974)
dir: Sidney Lumet

MUDDLE ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS
MAD #178, October 1975
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Angelo Torres

Yeah, I posted this two-fer cover before, but here it is again.

Five years after a seemingly unrelated murder and kidnapping of Daisy Amstrong, Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), is taking the Orient Express from Istanbul to England. He runs into his friend Sergio Bianchi (Martin Balsam), who owns the line and promises to give Poirot a compartment on the train, He finds there is no room and must share one. It is adjacent to that of widow Harriet Hubbard (Lauren Bacall). One of the passengers is businessman Samuel Ratchett (Richard Widmark) and his assistant Hector McQueen (Anthony Perkins). Ratchett's life is constantly in danger and he requests Poirot's services as a bodyguard.

Ratchett shows how he keeps a gun under his pillow to protect himself and the threatening letters he has recieved. Poirot refuses his services. Passengers on the train include Ms. Hubbard, Mary Debenham (Vanessa Redgrave), Count Rudolph (Michael York) and Countess Helena Andrenyi (Jacqueline Bisset), Swedish maid Greta Ohlsson (Ingrid Bergman), Mr. McQueen, Princess Natalia Dragamarimoff (Wendy Hiller) and her maid Hildegarde Schmidt (Rachel Roberts), valet Edward Beddoes (John Gielgud), car salesman Antonio Foscarelli (Dennis Quilley), talent agent Cyrus Hardman (Colin Blakely), and Colonel Arbuthnott (Sean Connery).

The next morning the train has come to a stop due to a snowstorm and Ratchett has been found stabbed. It is up to Poirot to solve the case while the train is snowbound. Poirot notices multiple stab wounds of varying depths and everyone is considered a suspect. The threats against Ratchet have been destroyed and in restoring them, it is revealed that he was actually a gangster named Cassetti and responsible for the Armstrong murder. Poirot questions all the passengers one by one.

Sean Connery had been James Bond for years before this.

Poirot finds that all suspects were connected to the Armstrong family and therefore had some kind of motive for the murder. He gathers all the passengers/suspects together and offers two solutions. A complicated one and a more simple one. Every one of the passengers' alibis is filled with inaccuracies so by the complex solution it makes sense every one of them committed the murder. Bianchi, knowing how much Ratchet/Cassetti deserved it, decides to cover it up with the simpler conclusion. He'll tell police it was just a mob hit, and the suspect must have escaped.

There is no African-American among the suspects. He was added for the joke. Though a porter would not have worn such a uniform in 1935.


MURDERING THE ORIENT EXPRESS
Cracked #126, August 1975
a: John Severin

The murder and headlines were in the beginning of the movie, but not used in MAD's parodies.

There is a Towering Inferno parody in the same issue.

Lou Silverstone revisited Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot character a few years later when he wrote one of MAD's paperbacks.

Benny Hill did a parody of the movie with impressions of Barnaby Jones, Columbo, Ironside, McCloud, Police Woman, Cannon, and Kojak. He's assisted by his cast of supporting actors lusting after women young enough to be their great-great-great granddaughters. There were a lot of parodies of American detective shows that had them all together.