LORD EDGWARE DIES (1934)

At a fancy charity ball, the hostess sings a song perfectly imitating the old performing style of Lady Edgware (Jane Carr), a former American chorus girl who married into wealth and a title and is present at the ball with Martin, her companion. She tells a friend she would like nothing better than to get rid of her husband, jokingly (we assume) saying that in Chicago, she could have him bumped off. Her friend's reply: "We feel human beings have a right to live—even husbands." Lady Edgware approaches the famous detective Hercule Poirot (Austin Trevor, at right) and his associate Capt. Hastings (Richard Cooper), and asks them to persuade Lord Edgware to give her a divorce. When Poirot calls, Edgware insists that he has already agreed to the divorce and had sent his wife a letter to that effect when he was visiting America a while back. The next morning, Edgware is found dead at his home, and two people positively identify his wife as the last person to see him alive, but as Poirot investigates, he discovers that Lady Edgware was at a party when she was supposedly at Edgware's house. The obvious suspect is the singer who imitated Lady Edgware at the ball, but she also winds up dead, and Poirot and Hastings are soon on the hunt, finding more people with motives for wanting Edgware dead, including the Duke of Merton (whom Lady Edgware wanted to marry) and Edward Marsh, a nephew who would come into money and a title on Lord Edgware's death.

The complaint most often voiced about this film, the earliest Agatha Christie film adaptation still in existence, is that Poirot is nothing like the way Christie presents him in her stories. Even those who've never read Christie are likely to have seen Albert Finney or Peter Ustinov or David Suchet play the Belgian sleuth, and it's true that Austin Trevor does not look or act or talk like the other Poirots—he is relatively tall and has no mustache, though the Belgian accent remains. Even more surprising is the portrayal of Hastings—Cooper plays him as a comic relief bumbler, a bit like Nigel Bruce would play Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes. But unless you’re an obstinate purist, I think most fans of classic-era mysteries would enjoy this. It's well-paced and, though I was not familiar with any of the actors here, well-acted, and the mystery plays out nicely. [YouTube]