Ladies and gentlemen, please, please, patience. You must have patience. Now you will all get the chance to state your views to Monsieur Perrault at his own good time. Hi. I'm Danny Boyd and this is Cinema Sticks, a celebration of film and film form.
Right! I have no fear, mademoiselle. They all come up looking much more peaceful. This scene comes from the 1974 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Sidney Lumet, one of the absolute finest to come out of the American new wave of cinema and the man behind, for my money, the greatest courtroom drama ever made.
You are the law. This sequence is five minutes long, rock solid, no cuts. Lila. Oh, like the French.
Bergman would go on to win an Academy Award for her role, one of the briefest Oscar-winning performances of all time. The scene is also representative of what I think this adaptation of Orient Express does best through its editing, its staging, and its camera work. Hello.
It observes. Mrs. Abbott, I'm sorry to have kept you. Take this scene from the 2017 adaptation, for example. I woke up in the dark and I knew there was a man in my room. Ten cuts, nine different shots.
You are certain it was a man? And yeah. I know what it feels like to have a man in my bedroom.
That's one option. Or... I mean there was a man in my compartment last night.
It was pitch dark, of course, and my eyes were closed in terror. Then how did you know it was a man? Because I've enjoyed very warm relationships with both my husbands.
We're a series of cuts and shots at it. governs where we look and for how long. A stationary frame that's well staged can deliver both action and reaction.
Don't you agree the man must have entered my compartment to gain access to Mr. Ratchet? I can think of no other reason, madam. It gives us complete information and the freedom to sit with characters and observe dynamics on our own terms, tenets of the original film that drove nearly every scene and technical decision. Sorry if I hurt the lad.
Provocation. Lumet was an actor's director. As different as Orient Express was from his usual body of work, it's no less a film about characters and their circumstances.
Well, can't you tap the telephone wires? We'll fire him off at all something. This is not a ship, madam. Where exactly are we? He wanted to impose a kind of claustrophobia.
understanding what that compactness does to a group of people packed aboard a passenger train, stranded in a snowdrift, and in turn how those conditions motivate the focus and compositions of your shots. The remake, by comparison, sidesteps these creative restrictions. Man ate more steak than I've ever seen in my entire life.
It finds every opportunity it can to leave the confines of the train, to expand the playing field, to keep things dynamic and ever-changing, but at the expense of perhaps some of the smaller details. Consider for instance the way the bulk of characters in each film are introduced. In Branagh's version, it's all about speed and variety.
Marquez and Estravaldos are introduced on the platform. Ratchet at the restaurant, Bedos McQueen checking in, the Count and Countess at the bar, Mrs. Hubbard in a tracking shot from outside the train, Dragon Mirror of an Armada arriving inside the train, and Hardman boarding here. Constant change, forward momentum. But by the end? Most of these intros last between 10 and 12 seconds.
Mrs. Hubbard gets the longest introduction, and yet we barely see her face. Um, so the alternative? Good evening Pierre. Madame la princesse, my respects.
Keep it simple. Try introducing your characters one at a time, in sequence, in the same location. Ah, Mrs. Harbour. It may sound boring, but with this many players, it brings the attention to the characters themselves, all else being equal.
30 seconds to a minute each, and linked with a common connective tissue. Ah. Pierre, the conductor, whose interactions with each passenger, though we wouldn't know it on a first viewing, tell us everything there is to know about who these characters are and what they're up to.
Here, our properties are as arranged. Because in the meta version, nothing is obscured. Least of all, by editing, we're given all the clues and all the time we need to consider them. And Pierre, since you are here already, we can conveniently start by questioning you.
The interrogation sequence no doubt provides the best example of this. In a similar structure as the introductions, we have a dozen suspects presented in sequence and given equal and ample time. to explain their stories.
I thought you did respond to Aladalande. Otherwise he will detain you longer than you would detain him. And that also means that as an audience, we hear all the questions You buy a message found in his compartment?
and get all the answers. Uh, he'd have burnt that, though, as I told you. So that for each character, we can make a determination of guilt He did it. or of suspicion.
Shots are long, expertly staged, and most of all, complete. The remake? Well, in line with its commitment to momentum and scale, cross-cutting, action sequences, and changes in the environment vie for our attention. Many of the interrogations here are edited in parallel, and as a result, questions are asked but never answered. Who did you chauffeur?
Interviews are cut away from but never concluded. He's Masterman. A man dying is a man with nothing to lose.
More occurs within these scenes, within our central character's awareness, than we're ultimately granted the privilege of observing, with information always just slightly abbreviated or obscured in the way it's presented. Rather than asking about a piece of evidence directly, even less point in asking the color of your dressing gown. that topic might be alluded to secondhand.
Assess Dravados told me you asked the color of her dressing gown. Rather than spending time on a vital clue, Unfortunately, the first letter of your marriage signature has been... Almost obliterated by a grease spot.
It's passed over and our attention redirected. By the way, there is a grease spot on your wife's name. You might want to look at that.
Helena is not well. What's so great about the simplicity and time spent with the original is that later, in the summation, all the testimony we heard can be referred back to as evidence, synthesized and reinterpreted under a new lens. Literally. Instead of the usual visual language of a flashback, distorted image, black and white, Lumet and the great Jeffrey Unsworth did something fascinating. Trial by 12 good men and true.
They would shoot the same key lines twice. By 12 good men and true. First as normal.
All my ladies have said so. Then immediately again in a radically different way. All my ladies have said so.
Different lighting, different angle and a wider lens. So that this in the interview... She was gentle and frightened....becomes this in the flashback.
Admitted under emotional stress that he had actually known Mrs. Armstrong, albeit very slightly. She was gentle and frightened. Same exact information we already had. Here is the simple answer.
Just a new way of looking at it. There is also a more complex one. This summation is a 30-minute tour de force.
Eight pages of monologue, limited cutting, every shot long, multi-compositional, and brilliantly staged. With action and reaction, 15 characters packed wall-to-wall as Hercule Poirot takes center stage in cramped quarters. For the sake of symmetry, here's the remake.
True to its own form, it finds yet another excuse to take us off the train. Seating everyone along one side of a last supper table, limiting the possibilities in staging, and restricting coverage to a series of doubles and singles, typical shot-reverse-shot, telling us where to look, what to listen to, and whose reactions matter. Plus some gun action for good measure.
Now, I'll be honest, I've been harder on Murder on the Orient Express's later outing than I set out to be. These are two films out of two very different eras of filmmaking, and I think the choice to make a modern movie that's more dynamic, more kinetic, and larger in scale to keep a wider audience engaged is beyond sensible. But what immerses me in the original adaptation of Orient Express is its simplicity and its dedication to the Agatha Christie tradition of laying it all out, and then taking a great detective to put it all together.
Will the 1974 version feel slow to a lot of people now? I have no doubt. But I think it's a more confident film. I think it puts more faith in its plot, in its performances, in its script, in its source material, and most importantly, in us, the viewers, offering us more control over where we choose to put our attention and what we choose to do with the information that we're given. As always, I'm Danny Boyd.
Thanks for watching. Hey everybody, today's video was brought to you by MUBI, a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from all across the world. From iconic directors to emerging auteurs, MUBI always has something new and amazing to discover. And that's because with MUBI, each and every film is hidden. hand-selected by a team of curators, giving you access to the best of cinema at your fingertips, streaming anytime, anywhere.
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