The Alphabet Murders (1965) - film review

Pursued across London by a British secret service agent who is tasked with deporting him back to his own country, the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot begins to investigate the mysterious killing of a high-diving clown with the initials A.A.   His first lead is a mysterious tall blonde woman who carries a handbag with the initials A.B.C.  When a woman with the initials B.B. is killed, Poirot begins to see a pattern and takes an interest Sir Carmichael Clarke, who is likely to be victim number three.  It transpires that Sir Carmichael’s wife has been having an affair with Duncan Doncaster, a psychiatric doctor whose most dangerous patient is an alphabetically obsessed woman named Amanda Beatrice Cross...

The Alphabet Murders owes its reputation as possibly the worst screen adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel to the obvious miscasting of Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot.  Randall’s grimaces and painful attempts at a Belgian accent certainly do not help the film but even without his dire contribution it is still a pretty dismal offering which fails both as a comedy and as a murder mystery.  The screenwriters obviously felt Ms Christie’s story was lacking in substance and so pepped it up with various subplots which somehow manage to completely swamp the original story.  Don’t even bother trying to make sense of the plot - it is beyond comprehension, and pretty well beyond silliness.  It is hard to believe that this comedy misfire could have been made by the same team that produced the Miss Marple films of the 1960s (although it can be argued that even these would have sunk without trace without Margaret Rutherford’s sterling contribution as the amateur ’tec).   No wonder Agatha Christie hated seeing her films adapted for cinema - this is a humourless and tediously daft abomination that should have been vetoed at the drawing board.

© Steve Chandler 2011

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