The Alphabet Murders (1965) Directed by Frank Tashlin
Crime / Mystery / Comedy
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.
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Film 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...
American film comedy had its heyday in the 1920s and '30s, but it remains an important genre and has given American cinema some of its enduring classics.
It was American film noir and pulp fiction that kick-started the craze for thrillers in 1950s France and made it one of the most popular and enduring genres.