What better way to follow-up Sydney Lumet’s Making Movies (and to celebrate his 90th birthday) than with one of his biggest movies: Murder on the Orient Express, a film so star-studded, you could enjoy a real train ride from Istanbul to Yugoslavia in the time it takes to get through the opening credits. You’ve got Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, and Lauren Bacall as just a few of the dozen suspects caught up in a murder mystery on rails, with Albert Finney sussing out the perpetrator as Agatha Christie’s fastidious Hercule Poirot.

It’s the makings of a smash when looking at the talent above line or below, but the reasons why Orient Express doesn’t seem to be one of Lumet’s better remembered works are pretty self-evident. Though packed wall-to-wall with notable actors from both stage and screen (a great anecdote from Making Movies has Lumet recalling how the actors sometimes mumbled during rehearsal due to feeling intimidated by their cross-form counterparts), there’s not a lot of time for development of a cast this large into anything more than a gaggle of suspects (I love Ingrid Bergman [who doesn’t?], but how she got an Oscar for about 5 minutes worth of screen time is the real mystery).

The structure of Christie’s story is confining both physically and narratively, as the rotating compartment door of interrogations gets a little tiring after a while. Finney is terrific in the lead, perhaps because, though I’m ashamed to admit it, this was my first experience with detective Poirot. The story lends itself well to reading or live theatre (I can vividly imagine how a stage working of Poirot’s 30-minute explanation of the crime would go), but as a film experience, Lumet gets trapped along with his guests in very tight spaces, adding an element of claustrophobia to the proceedings, but also a cheap staginess (in contrast, the most memorable shots are long tracking sequences that highlight the massive expanse and expense of the Orient Express itself).

The film has to frontload its exposition directly with a newspaper montage that makes for a dry follow-up to the extensive credits, but the final piece, a headline about a dead little girl that glows red like a hot brand, makes for an indelible image. Looking online makes it appear that the film was originally screened in black and white, so I have to wonder if my issues with the mis-en-scene would have been less severe had my viewing not been in colour. Regardless, the actorly wattage of Murder on the Orient Express will carry you through to its surprising and surprisingly morally ambiguous ending, and makes me think I should be spending more time with both Lumet and Mr. Poirot as soon as I can.