Nice adaptation of a typical Agatha Christie novel complete with hatfuls of obscure clues, red herrings, guilty secrets, and suspects with enough motives to kill the poor victim a dozen times over. The original novel, by the way, was called 'Lord Edgeware Dies' I'm not sure why the name change was needed. It's not an improvement.
The updating to a modern setting worked well up to a point - the opening talk show scene was an amusing addition, but the period setting is for me part of the charm, and the cosy relationship with the police that Poirot enjoys seemed less believable than it would have in it's original time.
The trouble with screen adaptations of characters like Poirot is that they are never quite how you imagined them. For me, neither Peter Ustinov as Poirot nor Jonathan Cecil as Hastings were at all right for the part. It is ironic that David Suchet who later established himself as the ultimate Poirot played Inspector Japp.
The updating to a modern setting worked well up to a point - the opening talk show scene was an amusing addition, but the period setting is for me part of the charm, and the cosy relationship with the police that Poirot enjoys seemed less believable than it would have in it's original time.
The trouble with screen adaptations of characters like Poirot is that they are never quite how you imagined them. For me, neither Peter Ustinov as Poirot nor Jonathan Cecil as Hastings were at all right for the part. It is ironic that David Suchet who later established himself as the ultimate Poirot played Inspector Japp.