In the beginning there was Murder on the Orient Express, with the English director and actor Kenneth Branagh re-enacting one of Agatha Christie’s most popular mysteries, competing with Sidney Lumet’s 1974 film with a stellar cast, with Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, Michael York and Sean Connery. A nice challenge. After the great success the second film was inevitable, Murder on the Nile, another well-known novel by the queen of crime fiction, with an equally scenographic setting and a precedent from 19748, and another cast of great actors such as Peter Ustinov, David Niven, Mia Farrow, Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Olivia Hussey, Jane Birkin and Maggie Smith.
And when the third film arrived, same type of title, Murder in Venice (less stellar cast, with a small part, that of Poirot’s bodyguard, also for our Riccardo Scamarcio), those who don’t know Christie’s bibliography simply thought it was the transposition of another of her detective stories, while those who have read Christie’s books have racked their brains to understand where it came from: a) the setting in Venice; b) a plot that turns more towards black than yellow. Unlike the first two films in which he essentially stuck to Agatha Christie’s novels, here Branagh takes inspiration very mildly from Poirot and the Massacre of the Innocents (Hallowe’en Party1969) to contaminate the plot with other stories, change the era and setting, and above all insist a lot on the supernatural element, coloring the story with horror nuances.
This in a nutshell the plot: the Belgian detective, after the horrors of the Second World War, decided to retire to Venice, giving up investigating. He is joined by his crime writer friend Ariadne Oliver who she convinces him to accompany her to a Halloween party at the palace of former opera singer Rowena Drake. The party will be followed by a séance. The aim is to unmask what she believes is a fake medium tasked with getting in touch with the daughter of the landlady, who committed suicide years earlier. There is a first murder and Poirot is forced against his will to return to the scene to unravel a complex skein. In reality Agatha Christie, who was a great traveler and chose various European and Mediterranean countries as the settings for her novels and stories, as well as naturally England, he never set anything in Venice. Who knows if he would have approved Branagh’s choice.
