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Overview
The Alphabet Murders is a British crime film first released in 1965,
directed by Frank Tashlin.
The film is based on a novel by Agatha Christie and stars Tony Randall, Anita Ekberg, Robert Morley, Maurice Denham and Guy Rolfe.
It has also been released under the title: The ABC Murders.
Our overall rating for this film is: very poor.
Synopsis
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...
Film Review
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 Write a review for this film... User Comments
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Credits
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If you like this film you may also like the following: Carry on Spying (1964) Dead of Night (1945) Death on the Nile (1978) Dr. Strangelove (1964) Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) Green for Danger (1946) Hue and Cry (1947) The Ladykillers (1955) The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) The League of Gentlemen (1960) Murder on the Orient Express (1974) The Pink Panther (1963) Too Many Crooks (1959) The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963) |


