I’m usually a fan of the David Suchet Poirot. However, I think there is something missing or wrong about the tone of his version of “Murder on the Orient Express.” It comes down to Chesterton’s benediction in Orthodoxy, “There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”
The David Suchet version has forgotten that Poirot is, at least in this story, something of a deconstruction, a joke, a play upon the tropes of the genre. If the Peter Ustinov movies were a little too silly, this particular installment was a little too serious. You cannot imagine David Suchet’s Poirot bursting into laughter the way Albert Finney’s does.
But on a deeper level, there was something anti-Christian about it. In Suchet’s version, it is implied that the murder victim was honestly seeking divine forgiveness and that both by Poirot’s decision and his murderers’, he was denied; even, to an extent, by God himself in sending the snowstorm.
It is, perhaps, the hardest part of Christianity. If many disciples left when Christ said to eat his flesh, I think many have also left when told to forgive their enemies. I’ll go back to Chesterton again: “For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.” Or to call upon C. S. Lewis: “You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker.” It is a dreary tale, the Suchet version, painting things blacker and blacker under the oppression of the white, white snow. I do not want mercy for Ratchet in any version, and yet, as I hope for forgiveness for my own sins, how could I hope that another’s were retained?
Agatha Christie seems to wink at the reader chapter by chapter. Barely holding back a smile, she asks, Have you figured it out yet? Perhaps our austere and righteous Lord too, has said, “It is finished,” and we have not quite caught on. Perhaps we have all been discovered in our crime by a smiling sleuth who uncovers our sins only for the pleasure of forgiving them.
Tale Told 