Behind the Scenes: Murder on the Orient Express (Lumet, 1974) with Albert Finney and Lauren Bacall

When I first read the script and read that ending, and talk about who'd done it, they all done it. It was, I mean, I was absolutely bowled over by the cleverness of her plot. So between a wonderful plot, lovely dialogue by Paul Dane, and the fact that it met a real need for me in my own work, in terms of where I was going with the work, it was the perfect movie for that time. I made with my wife a ballet film called Tales of Beatrix Potter, which was a huge success in this country, and it was mildly successful everywhere else. It was a big success in Russia. I took my daughter to a festival over there in 73 or 74, and she was so engrossed in her Agatha Christie that she refused to stand in the queue to see Lenin's Tomb. When she sat reading, and of the book she was reading was Murder on the Orient Express, so I thought, well, there must be something in that. So I reread it, and I thought, well, why don't we make a film of this? And that's how it all started. As a director of the line, I command you to place Monsieur Poirot above Mr. McQueen's number four. I wasn't really familiar with Agatha Christie's work. I knew that she was very difficult about giving the rights to a story, because she felt that nothing really had been done for work that she was at all proud of. She thought that it had just turned into a commercial sausage factory. So fortunately, one of the producers on the movie was John Braeburn, Lord Braeburn, cousin of the Queen. We're talking about a little bit of power here. So he was able to get to her and convince her of it. There was a man called Cork, who I heard of him, who was her agent, and he was a marvelous character, a famous, famous character in this country. And he said, you'll never get to do it, it's a complete waste of your time. And anyway, I said, we'll have a go. So eventually, he went down to Wallingford, near Oxford, which is where my grandmother lived. And outside, not very far, half a mile from where she lived, was one of those, you don't see them these days, one of those red phone boxes. That's right, that's quite true, yes, yes, I'd forgotten that, actually. Yes, I heard that she lived just near where I was. And he said, it's John Braeburn here. She said, just come round if you want to. She liked a good lunch. We used to go to the Savoy Hotel, places like that, and have lunch. And then I eventually, one day, said, did you ever see Tales of Beatrix Potter? She'd seen Tales of Beatrix Potter. She liked the way that had been done. And she said, well, if you're as good, as true to the book as you were to that, you go ahead and make it. After we finished, my brother-in-law pressed, and he liked it very much. Then we took three more. We took the rights on three more. John Braeburn can claim the credit for somebody who convinced my grandmother that there were people in the movie industry of real integrity and enthusiasm for the subjects that they were supposed to be creating. In those days, Nat Cohen had just taken over EMI Films, and he'd made a lot of domestic British pictures. And he said, well, you know, I'll give you half the money if you can get the other half. And John went over and saw Charlie Bludon from Paramount. And when I went into the room, I wasn't at all sure what the result was going to be. And he said, well, tell me the story. So I told him the story about the train. What was the train called? He said, I said, it was called the Mars Express. He said, did that stop in Vienna? So I said, yes, it did. That's it. That's the one, he said. I used to work in the canteen there, and I used to watch this train go through. Now I'm going to make this film. I mean, he just banged his head on the table and said, that's it. Of course, the script is the most important thing. It always is in a film. Well, once Paul Dane had produced a decent script, and Sidney wanted to do it. He was the perfect director for it. We both knew it. I met them with John Braeburn and Richard Goodwin. And I said, look, there are many ways of doing this movie. I don't want to do it as a small little realistic British mystery movie. To me, it's extremely glamorous. I think what we ought to do is cast it all star. When I produced Romeo and Juliet with Franco Zeffirelli, one of the people I met was an actor, a Dyson Lovell, who had helped very, very, very much in casting that picture. When Richard and I came to talk about Madelon's Express, we just made a list together of what we wanted with Dyson. We sort of looked at them and said, well, who's going to pay for all that? So we went to see Nat Cohen, and he thought it was a wonderful idea too. Then I knew that the key was to get the biggest one. If we can land the biggest star, it's going to help get the other stars. And so I went to Sean first, because we already had already done pictures. And he loved the whole idea. Sidney is always stimulating and a good friend, Sidney. It was a very difficult casting job. First of all, Albert Fimmi was much too young. He was in his 30s. And interestingly enough, it's comparatively easy to take a 30-year-old and make him up as a 75-year-old man or 80-year-old man. But to make him up as a 55, 60-year-old man, that's tough, because you don't necessarily have the lines and the pouches and all of the things that we older people have. The main requisite and the main reason for going with him is that I needed a brilliant actor. My first choice was not available. It was Alec Innes and also Paul Scofield. Neither of them were available. So I went to the equally brilliant but far too young Albert Fimmi. Everybody we spoke to said, yes, they wanted to do it, because somehow they got around that Sidney was going to direct it and that it was a good script and got a sort of name of its own. Every few days we got a telegram saying, yes, we'll do it. Sidney Lumet contacted my agent and I met with him. And it was such a small part. We all had these very small parts. He got this amazing cast together, which I was very flattered to be asked. But I was still rather curious why we'd been picked and what he expected from us. Everybody was delighted with the parts that they had, except Ingrid. When I originally sent her the script to do the Princess Dragomiroff, I went up to see her. She could not have been more charming. And she said, Sidney, I want to do this crazy nanny. One of the joys, of course, was joining this absolutely sublime cast of luminaries. In fact, Richard Widmark said he agreed to do the movie just to meet the people. And it was extraordinary being surrounded by so many mega stars. Everybody was known, but we had pure movie actors like Sean Connery and Lauren Bacall and Richard Widmark. And this extraordinary assemblage of stage actors, Wendy Hillard. In fact, when we were shooting, five of the actors were appearing in the West End then. Gielgud was doing The Tempest. Dennis Quilley, who played the chauffeur in The Tempest also. Vanessa was in a play. Albert was in a play. Bergman was in a play. We did, in fact, have a rehearsal period, which is, I think, quite useful on a movie. In this case, I think it was very useful in breaking the ice. Everyone was a little kind of maybe intimidated is too strong a word. What was absolutely charming was that on the first day of rehearsal, we started the first reading. And after about 10 pages, I stopped everybody and said, people, I'm sorry, but we were just sitting around the table, the 12 of us and myself making it 13. And I said, I can't hear anybody. And I realized, of course, what it was. The stage actors were completely in awe of the movie stars. And the movie stars were completely in awe of the stage actors. And everybody was afraid to let go. So that everybody was leaving their little part like this and just looking over the top of their script. It was charming. And I said, do I detect two snobisms at work here that the stage actors wish they were movie stars and the movie stars wish they were stage actors? Can we get rid of all that nonsense and everybody just start acting a little? And there was a big laugh and on we went. The plot of the film is hinged on this kidnap, which is done right up front. This, in fact, was based on the notorious kidnap and subsequent murder of Charles Lindbergh's baby. One can see where the impetus for the story is coming from. Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator who in 1927 was the first flyer to solo across the Atlantic from America to Paris. He and his wife had a young baby and the baby was literally abducted from its room. There was a ransom note and there were clues. A German carpenter, immigrant carpenter named Richard Bruno Hauptmann was eventually arrested, tried and convicted for the crime, though he maintained his innocence all the way to his execution. Out of this rather sordid and unhappy material, Agatha Christie wove what Sidney Lumet then transmuted into this souffle of a mystery and who killed the Lindbergh baby. To set off the stylization of the movie, Tony Walton said, well, you know, whenever we cut to the newspaper headlines, what can we do about them? Can't we photographically do them? I had been working with Richard Williams, the great animator, and Richard made rough footage, sometimes just in the form of drawings. Sidney's description of what he needed led us into a great many discussions and experiments. And I said, oh my God, because in those days, and this is where the phrase yellow journalism came from, William Randolph Hearst with the San Francisco Examiner as a way of attracting attention to his late afternoon edition, the front page was yellow. And so that in effect, we had a real model to follow fairly closely. And there we were, again, we could go to the reality and use it to increase the stylization. And Tony just leapt at that, every single device possible, everything was helpful. We started, in fact, we went to Paris, but in the most unglamorous location you could wish for, it was some railway repair yard. The only location we could get that was big enough was a railroad shed in Paris, where they repaired engines, gigantic, you can imagine a whole train could pull into there. And Jeff Unsworth, brilliant Jeff Unsworth, the cameraman, was lighting, of course. The train itself, we had the opportunity to reinvent a version of it because the actual Orient Express no longer existed at that time. The engine did in an engine shed, and it couldn't travel very far. The train itself was very largely fake because none of the carriages existed in a finished and functional form. Portions of them existed in museums, I think mostly in Belgium. And we were able to borrow some portions that contained the Lalique paneling and so on, so that we could use maybe one portion and then duplicate it. We, of course, had to do it in Europe because the Orient Express being a European train, the gauge is different than England. The English trains, the wheels are set at a different width. So we had to do it on the continent, got this place in Paris. And each of the introductions, had to be worked out. One of the first things that Sidney Lumet made clear to me was that he didn't want the movie to be a kind of documentary recreation of the Orient Express or of life in the era in which the story was set. He wanted it to be ultra-glamorous reminder of what movies were like and the world of movies. He also wanted, this was very scary to me, but he wanted the costumes to look like costumes as opposed to clothes. He said, make it look like the brand new thing that you've just finished the stitching on. So in the course of this one morning, I had to not only be sure that every aspect of the train itself looked acceptably Orient Express-ish, and also all the characters would be happy with their costumes that they were getting into for the first time. And they were some very substantial stars with very strong opinions. And also, of course, their costumes had to be acceptable to Sidney Lumet. So it was a pretty daunting morning. But one particular one I remember, Lauren Bacall's large, steeply angled hat. She said to me, smartly, and I'm embarrassed that it not crossed my mind. She said, are we sure that Sidney's camera position for my arrival onto the platform is not going to be where he won't be able to see me because the hat slants down here and he has his camera over there and I'm gone. It couldn't be anybody. And I went, oh my God, I'd made the hat in such a way that it couldn't easily swapped over to the other side. It would have looked totally inappropriate. And so that was one of those moments when we both went onto the train platform and faced Sidney and Jeff Unsworth with great trepidation. He said, don't worry, you're in great shape. The camera's going to be there. But during that sequence, we had all our oysters and sides of beef and all that, all the luxury stuff we wanted to see in the film, stored in a wagon. And the moment came when we'd finished with the actors and we wanted to shoot all this luxury goods going on. I opened the carriage, nothing there. It had all been stolen. Somebody had opened the other side of the goods train and stolen it all. But those were in the days when it was two o'clock, one o'clock in the morning in Paris in those days. And I remember going out with a huge wad of money and rebuying all the props. The running shots of the train, the whole sequence of the train getting stuck, we did in the French Alps. I remember a charming little town called Pontellier, where always there was snow by late October or November. The day before, there was absolutely no snow. I said, Sidney, look, we've got to do something and I've got to get some trucks. So he said, well, if you want to spend the money, OK, but I've had a word with Almighty and there's going to be snow. I said, Sidney, I'm going to do the forecast. So anyway, I ordered my trucks, 10 very large trucks of snow, and they went off. And that night, of course, it snowed and it snowed and it snowed. And all next day, I mean, the train, you know, we shot it all. It was lovely. The train was blocked and everything else. But the biggest problem I had was all the trucks I'd sent off got blocked by the snow with the snow on them. The main part of the film was shot at Elstree Studios in the north of London on a set. Sidney Lumet didn't want, interestingly enough, to do what movies of the 30s conventionally did, which is to enlarge the proportions of the interior of the train to make it easier to manoeuvre the camera and get the shots he needed. He wanted to have it as compacted as the real train was to force him into revealing the kind of claustrophobia that was part of the story. We needed an enormous space because we had a full railroad car on the stage. But for some of the scenes in the dining car, we were doing what is called rear screen photography. We had gone out and shot the actual countryside that we needed. And in front of each window, each one with its own projector upon which was projected the passing countryside. If I was going from window one to window two, there had to be a progress in the picture, which meant that each one of the projectors had to be loaded up with a different leader so that this one was two seconds behind that one. This one was two seconds behind that one. Between the fourth window and the first window would be eight seconds difference in the scene that they were showing. And the same on the other side. The brilliant Jeff Unsworth said, why don't we just get a crane in here, pick up the car, turn it around and drop it back down where it was. And then we don't have to move any of the screens or projectors, which is exactly what we did. My name is Ratchet. Do I have the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Hercule Poirot? Pleasure possibly, Mr. Ratchet, the intention certainly. I'd worked with Jeffrey Unsworth before on Cabaret. He's a true master and very modest, just brilliant. He just does it. And he was the cinematographer on Murder on the Orient Express. Having to light an even more confined space than the Cabaret itself. But the images are beautiful. I think everything was sort of first class. I knew from the beginning that one of the great values that we could, that we could exploit, frankly, in this movie was nostalgia. So aside from the sets, costumes, lighting, the way it was going to be photographed, I knew I wanted a very lush and original score. I got involved with Murder on the Orient Express because Steve Sondheim recommended me, which is a great honor. So I went out to Elstree Studios where they were filming. I saw bits of the film and I said, don't make me do a score where I'm adapting Gershwin and let me do a real score, a proper film music score. And he said, he's wonderful and he really trusts you. He lets you do what you believe is right. So I said, this is a huge entertainment. I said, I want to give the audience that feeling of glamor, you know, of excitement. The first day we worked together, he said, we were going to need a big piece of music for this train. And I could have done music that just went like a train, but that's not glamorous for me. And I try and avoid what's happening on the screen. So I thought what I can do, I can make that train dance. I can make that train so glamorous with the big walls because I wanted to make it just gorgeous. Bernard Herrmann was an American born composer and he wrote a lot of movies for Alfred Hitchcock. When Bernard Herrmann saw Murder on the Orient Express and heard that waltz as the train was pulling out of the station, he was furious. And his comment was, there was a train of death. And where the hell are you getting off with this waltz? Whereas from Richard Rodney Bennett's point of view, it was clearly the glamour, the exotic romantic. It was those costumes, that parade of movie stars getting on that train. It was the era. You can be frightened out of your senses by Hitchcock film, right? I mean, think about Psycho with that marvelous score. But we were doing something that was basically very kitschy. It wasn't a horror film. It wasn't frightening. It's a huge entertainment. So I did what I thought was appropriate for a huge entertainment. When we came to the recording sessions, I started by playing the waltz because I wanted so badly to hear it with the film. And it was 10 o'clock in the morning. It was very hard to get the players up to play really glamorously. I saw Sidney and the producers off in a corner of the recording room. That's always worrying because you think they're going to say, he's got it completely wrong. This is a disaster. We'll have to get another composer. So I said, what are you guys talking about? And they said, we're saying it's absolutely marvelous. Well, I nearly burst into tears and fell on the ground. There were two big moments in it where I knew that we had a winner. One was what I told you about on the platform when all that business started and the train set off. And the next moment is when you cut, you see, from that to the music, the clang of the light when it went on. And the first time I saw the music through, we ran through all the music straight through. And the hairs on the back of my head stood up. I just knew we had a winner. I just knew it. As luck would have it, the sound man on me was one of those total English eccentrics who loved trains and had the sound effects of every great train that ever was. We finished the sound effect mix and now we went back to the beginning of the picture to add the score. And now I hear Richard's music to that train leaving. And it's brilliant. The trouble was they were fighting each other. The natural sound was never going to work with the music. The music was never going to work with the natural sound. And I said, fellas, we're not going to use the natural sound. We're going to do it only to the music. And except for the one in the steam, the sound effects guy, I could just see the tears welling, literally welling up in his eyes. And he walked out and never came back. My grandmother was always reluctant to appear in public. She always said quite firmly to anybody who asked her that she was an author, not an actor. But there were occasions on which she felt that she should appear. And I'm sure the only reason she appeared at the premiere of Orient Express was to show her respect for those others like John Braben, Richard Goodwin, Sidney Lumet and all the actors and actresses who she felt had made a really worthwhile and artistic visual representation of her story. And that really mattered to her. We were very fortunate because she was still alive when Murder on the Orient Express was made. And she, in fact, came to the premiere with her husband, who was an archaeologist. In fact, she said, she said very sweetly, she said, you know, the wonderful thing about being married to an archaeologist is that the older you get, the more they love you. How did you know it was a man? Because I've enjoyed very warm relationships with both my husbands. With your eyes closed. That helped. Paramount very wisely opened it on a Sunday. And in two theaters, that's all. One in New York and one in California. I knew the head of marketing very well. And he called me and he said, the reviews are coming in and they'll be in the papers Monday morning and they're terrific. And the next day, John Braben and Richard Goodwin had flown over from England. The next day was the opening day. And we went down, it opened at the Sutton, which was then the prime art house in New York, seated about 700 people. And the block, the line was literally around the block and stayed that way all day. And there was this huge queue around the block at 10 o'clock in the morning on a Sunday morning. And we said, look, something's happened here. We went in and sat down and started the thing to start. And as it did, all these names as they came up individually, there was applause from different parts of the thing for the one for their favorites. Almost every big, grossing picture that's gotten good reviews gets some kind of push toward Academy Awards. It happens almost automatically. And it happened here. We had wonderful reviews. We got six nominations. We were nominated for Best Picture. Tony Walton got two nominations. Richard Rodney got a nomination. And I think Jeff Unsworth for the photography. Ingrid won for her very carefully chosen role. The fact that I was nominated for this and some other pictures and, you know, I won the British Award for the best score of the year. It was thrilling. The best of the directors, the ones that I really admire, are the ones who try different things. Sidney Lumet was and remains a guy who is eager to test himself, to change himself, to try new things. And I think that the best artists are always people who are trying to sort of push their own envelopes. And to me, it was less remarkable that Sidney Lumet did Murder on the Orient Express than that he did it so well. If the movie had not been so much fun and so terrific, maybe we would criticize him and say, oh, why did he try to do something that was so clearly unrelated to his strengths, his home turf, New York City, urban, gritty, American. But he pulled it off. It was such an exercise in style. I had tremendous gratification. So many of the visual elements when I specifically had gone out after visual elements, it was nice to see it acknowledged. The casting of Orient Express and the way it was constructed was pure genius. And it was the combination of the producers and a really top class, in those days, young director and a wonderful script written by Paul Dane, who died very shortly afterwards, which was, in my opinion, one of the great tragedies that has happened to the Agatha Christie. I would love him to have written more scripts, but he understood more about my grandmother's ability to write dialogue than almost any script writer we've had before or since. Murder on the Orient Express sort of let rip a Agatha Christie celebration. It was realized just how entertaining these films were and nothing creaky about the plots. Here is my performance. This is the famous camel hair overcoat, which is now mine, but at one time belonged to Count Andrenyi. We parted company at the end of filming, and then I think a good 10 years passed. And I was in Canada shooting a film, and this was handed to me on a hanger. I felt like an old pro at that point when I started that. But by the end of the film, I didn't feel like an old pro. I said, what did I think I'd done a lot of? I'd done a lot of films, but I hadn't met people like the people I met there. And I said, I'm just a beginner, which is great. I think you want to remember that this was much the most important picture I'd made at that time. Looking back, the others, one or two of them turned out to be very last, luckily, and have been successful. But this was really a very special occasion. I was always convinced that it was a good story. And I was convinced the script was good. And from then on, I mean, it was just a matter of luck. One of the most satisfying things about doing the picture was it was so important that I learned how to do a movie that was gay in spirit. I have often said, because I feel it, and it's true, I never could have done Network if I hadn't done Murder on the Orient Express first. The whole ability to disguise the seriousness of Network and keeping a comic gay spirit going, I could not have done if I hadn't had the experience from doing Orient Express.