The most suspicious character is... Poirot’s moustache

FOR those of us who recall going to the cinema to see the last film version of Agatha Christie’s most celebrated whodunnit, it doesn’t take much exercising of the little grey cells to work out that there are people now well into their 40s who weren’t yet born when it came out.

yet anyone who saw Sidney Lumet’s stylish, star-studded film at the pictures in 1974, or has watched it on telly since, should be warned that this one, directed by Kenneth Branagh, doesn’t ever quite puff and chuff its way out of a very long shadow. Train travel’s most romantic age was much better evoked in Lumet’s film, too.

The star quotient is almost as high, though. Branagh himself takes centrestage as Belgium’s world- famous sleuth and world-class pedant Hercule Poirot, with Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Penelope Cruz, Derek Jacobi, Willem Dafoe, Olivia Colman and Daisy Ridley among those playing the train’s enigmatic passengers.

But does this movie pump exciting new life into Christie’s story? Not really. Its main fresh twist is to Poirot’s moustache, which practically becomes a character in its own right. More of that magnificent beast later.

There are a few other, more subtle changes. Screenwriter Michael Green has thrown in a couple of new characters, and there is a vague nod to a world beyond the Orient Express, with half-hearted references to Stalin. The acrid whiff of racism swirls around once or twice, and a touchy-feeliness develops that was certainly not present in 1974, still less 40-odd years before that, when Christie wrote her novel.

Emotions don’t just run high on this train; they are deconstructed in such a modern way that it’s almost a surprise not to find Poirot contemplating the savage slaughter of a shifty American called Mr Rachett (Depp) over a small soya latte.

We even get an unprecedented glimpse into the great detective’s sex life, as he moons over a photograph of a lost lover. But none of this is enough to explain why the Orient Express has been hauled out of the sidings after so many years. The action begins in 1934, in Palestine, where our hirsute hero is solving another crime. For much of the film’s first act, Branagh plays Poirot largely for laughs, which is disconcerting, despite the innate comedy value of the moustache, and an accent that recalls another lion of historical fiction, Rene the cafe-owner in ’Allo ’Allo.

Soon, Poirot is in Istanbul, boarding the Calais-bound Orient Express. At first, he has to share a cabin because every berth in all classes of accommodation has been booked, yet his legendary powers of detection somehow fail to resolve the question that nagged relentlessly at me: if the train’s meant to be so blinking packed, how come there are only about 18 people on it?

Branagh should have got Southern Rail to advise him; they know how to make a train look like it has half of all humanity crammed aboard. But maybe there was no budget left for extras, after they’d paid for the moustache.

yes, it’s time to consider the hairy phenomenon. It’s not the only moustache in the film. In fact, there are so many others of all dimensions from bushy to bristly, pencil to toothbrush, that it is no surprise to find Murder On The Orient Express is in partnership with the Movember Foundation, which urges men to grow facial hair this month in aid of charity.

Not that there’s time to sprout a scene-stealing whopper like Poirot’s. I spent much of the film wondering what it reminded me of, and eventually – pretty much at the moment that Poirot worked out who killed Mr Ratchett — the penny dropped. It looks, in a certain light, curiously like a greying Dougal, the dog in The Magic Roundabout.

In fairness, it is much truer to Christie’s original vision than most of those sported by others who have played Poirot – including David Suchet on TV – whose ’tache always looked to me as if he got it out of a Christmas cracker.

SOwe should credit Branagh for that, and for assembling a fine cast. Dame Judi is predictably marvellous, swaddled in fur as the grandest of grandes dames, Russian Princess Natalia Dragomiroff. Colman does a fine job, too, as the put-upon German maid.

And it’s nice to see Pfeiffer in a film more watchable than the execrable Mother!, switching between flightiness and cunning as the husbandhunting widow Mrs Hubbard. She has some knockout lines, too. ‘If your eyes linger any longer I’ll have to charge rent,’ she murmurs to Mr Ratchett.

Whether you can remember the plot or not, this is no place to give it away. Suffice to say there’s a connection to a cause celebre Christie borrowed from the notorious real-life kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, and that far from Poirot being stumped as to why anyone might bump off Mr Ratchett, there are motives coming out of his ears.

But not, I might add, out of his nostrils. That bit of Poirot is reserved for only one thing, and what a thing it is.