Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Murder on the Orient Express
1974 · Sidney Lumet · Murder on the Orient Express on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch where each passenger sits, and who enters through which door. (staging)
Lumet stages the carriage like a play, using entrances, seating, and proximity to define relationships before anyone speaks.
Payoff: The blocking is itself information, telling you who watches whom before dialogue does.
Listen for the waltzing music that swells as the train departs. (sound)
Richard Rodney Bennett's theme turns a locomotive pulling out of a station into a swooning romantic flourish, then curdles into unease as the case darkens.
Payoff: The score tells you when to feel glamour and when to feel dread, guiding you without a word.
Watch how each actor gets one distinct scene to make an impression. (performance)
Bacall, Connery, Bergman, Gielgud and the rest each land a self-contained miniature, a vivid habit or tic that fixes them in memory quickly.
Payoff: The film hands each detail meaning through repetition, so a single gesture can stand in for a whole character. In the reading: mark. A pipe cleaner means a pipe smoker; a handkerchief means a name. Each miniature teaches you a chain to expect.
Notice the soft, glowing light on every face in close-up. (camera)
Geoffrey Unsworth diffuses and flatters each face with the same glamorizing light he used on 2001 and Cabaret, giving the period a dreamlike sheen.
Payoff: The lighting makes every suspect look equally trustworthy and equally beautiful, hiding the killer in plain sight.
Once you have seen it
Count the number and severity of Ratchett's twelve stab wounds. (structure)
Some wounds are savage, some feeble; some struck by a strong hand, some by a weak one. No single killer fits this pattern.
Payoff: The inconsistency is a demark, an anomaly that breaks the film's usual clue-logic and forces a new explanation. In the reading: demark. Twelve unequal blows can't be one hand; the anomaly forces you to imagine twelve hands instead.
Watch Poirot deliver two different solutions in the dining car. (structure)
He offers a decoy stranger and then the true, collective account, then leaves the choice of which to believe to the assembled company.
Payoff: The fair-play machine works perfectly, then declines to hand down one verdict, refusing to close the problem it raised.
Watch Bergman's single unbroken take as Greta Ohlsson. (performance)
The camera holds on her face through one long uninterrupted take, a single quality expressed and held rather than cut into pieces.
Payoff: Her held face is what Deleuze calls a qualisign, a quality registered on screen and never discharged into action. In the reading: icon of quality / qualisign. Her held face is what Deleuze calls a qualisign, a quality registered on screen and never discharged into action.
Carry this in: Watch the seating and doorways in the carriage; Lumet treats blocking as evidence.