Most cinematic or television adaptations of Agatha Christie's crime fiction are serious in intention, remaining faithful to the spirit of her work even if the details of her plots are sometimes altered. "The Alphabet Murders", unusually, is ostensibly based on the plot of a Christie novel but treats it as a comedy. The film is little-known today; indeed, I had never heard of it until I recently caught it on television. It features one of Christie's two best-known characters, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. (The other one, Miss Marple, makes a brief cameo appearance in the person of Margaret Rutherford).
Poirot is confronted by a serial killer who appears to be working his, or her, way through the alphabet; the first victim is named Albert Aachen, the second Betty Barnard, and so on. The most likely suspect is a young woman named Amanda Beatrice Cross, with the significant initials ABC, who appears to have mental health issues; Poirot has to decide whether Amanda really is the killer and, if so, whether someone else is manipulating her. There is also a running joke about Rufus Hastings, a British Foreign Office official, who is continually trying to persuade Poirot to leave the country for his own safety, and Poirot's refusal to do so. (In the original novels Poirot had a sidekick named Hastings, the Watson to his Holmes, but his Christian name was Arthur and he did not work for the Foreign Office).
When the film was recently shown on television, the reviewer for one newspaper compared it to a mixture of Agatha Christie and a Carry On film. There is some truth in that comparison, as the Carry On films, when they were not relying on bawdiness, obtained a lot of their humour from parodying other films or film genres. ("Carry On Cowboy", for example, sends up the Western, long before Mel Brooks had that particular idea). The idea of parodying the Christie-style whodunit is in itself a good one; the genre is, after all, a hidebound, formulaic one which offers plenty of targets to the satirist. Unfortunately, "The Alphabet Murders" just does not work as a comedy.
Besides the "Carry On" films an obvious influence on the film was Blake Edwards's "The Pink Panther" from a couple of years earlier. The film-makers seem to have conceived Poirot, another Francophone detective, as the equivalent of Peter Sellers's Inspector Clouseau, and the part was originally intended for the American comedian Zero Mostel. Unfortunately, Mostel was unable to take the part which went to Tony Randall who, on this evidence, does not appear to have shared Sellers's comedic talents. Admittedly, he receives little assistance from a singularly unfunny script and is reduced to repeating catch-phrases like "leetle grey cells" in a foreign accent in an attempt to raise laughs. One might have thought that Robert Morley, who often played pompous, self-satisfied characters, might have made something of the pompous, self-satisfied bureaucrat Hastings, but even he does not contribute much.
The film does not work either as a murder mystery or as a comedy; it is too silly, and the plot too confusing and difficult to follow, for it to succeed as the former, and the attempts at humour too leaden for it to succeed as the latter. The obscurity into which it has fallen since 1965 is well-deserved. It is notable that subsequent actors to play Poirot, such as Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov in films from the seventies and eighties, and David Suchet in the more recent television series, have taken the character more seriously. 2/10
Poirot is confronted by a serial killer who appears to be working his, or her, way through the alphabet; the first victim is named Albert Aachen, the second Betty Barnard, and so on. The most likely suspect is a young woman named Amanda Beatrice Cross, with the significant initials ABC, who appears to have mental health issues; Poirot has to decide whether Amanda really is the killer and, if so, whether someone else is manipulating her. There is also a running joke about Rufus Hastings, a British Foreign Office official, who is continually trying to persuade Poirot to leave the country for his own safety, and Poirot's refusal to do so. (In the original novels Poirot had a sidekick named Hastings, the Watson to his Holmes, but his Christian name was Arthur and he did not work for the Foreign Office).
When the film was recently shown on television, the reviewer for one newspaper compared it to a mixture of Agatha Christie and a Carry On film. There is some truth in that comparison, as the Carry On films, when they were not relying on bawdiness, obtained a lot of their humour from parodying other films or film genres. ("Carry On Cowboy", for example, sends up the Western, long before Mel Brooks had that particular idea). The idea of parodying the Christie-style whodunit is in itself a good one; the genre is, after all, a hidebound, formulaic one which offers plenty of targets to the satirist. Unfortunately, "The Alphabet Murders" just does not work as a comedy.
Besides the "Carry On" films an obvious influence on the film was Blake Edwards's "The Pink Panther" from a couple of years earlier. The film-makers seem to have conceived Poirot, another Francophone detective, as the equivalent of Peter Sellers's Inspector Clouseau, and the part was originally intended for the American comedian Zero Mostel. Unfortunately, Mostel was unable to take the part which went to Tony Randall who, on this evidence, does not appear to have shared Sellers's comedic talents. Admittedly, he receives little assistance from a singularly unfunny script and is reduced to repeating catch-phrases like "leetle grey cells" in a foreign accent in an attempt to raise laughs. One might have thought that Robert Morley, who often played pompous, self-satisfied characters, might have made something of the pompous, self-satisfied bureaucrat Hastings, but even he does not contribute much.
The film does not work either as a murder mystery or as a comedy; it is too silly, and the plot too confusing and difficult to follow, for it to succeed as the former, and the attempts at humour too leaden for it to succeed as the latter. The obscurity into which it has fallen since 1965 is well-deserved. It is notable that subsequent actors to play Poirot, such as Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov in films from the seventies and eighties, and David Suchet in the more recent television series, have taken the character more seriously. 2/10