Almost great
Why do they have to change all the character's names??? This otherwise excellent treatment of an excellent book suffers from having all the people with new names. And my ultimate Poirot will always be David Suchet, followed by Peter Ustinov and then Albert Finney. The show is saved by excellent (if somewhat overacted at times) performances. They did avoid rewriting the story. Overall, top entertainment and one of the best mystery novels to date.

thanks!
ordered this one with another and they both arrived very quickly- excellent condition- great service Thanks! :)

Timeless Classic
I've wanted this movie for my DVD collection for a long time. Its a great story and an even better representation of Agatha Christie's novel. The actors are larger than life but are rivaled by their surroundings. Its a great look back at a past era of history and movie making.

Very enjoyable
I love mysteries and I love Agatha Christie. Though not overly exciting or suspensful, this is a gem of a film. It features wonderful performances and a great favorite character of mine, Hercule Poirot. He is just a very likeable man and he kept me guessing the whole while. Its more of a character film than a true mystery, though it definitly contains that element. I read the book in school and it certainly remains loyal, I believe, to the text, which is such a rarity.

The last gasp of old Hollywood
In many ways, this all-star film, based very faithfully on Agatha Christie's most famous exotic Hercule Poirot murder mystery, was the last gasp of what in 1974 constituted "old Hollywood", directed by one of its best young studio directors of the time (Sidney Lumet) and featuring a remarkable cast of actors many of whom hearkened back to the great era of the studio system (including Lauren Bacall, George Coulouris, and Ingrid Bergman), many great stars of the British stage (Wendy Hiller, John Gielgud, and Wendy Hiller), and also many of the best stars working in film since the collapse of the studio system (Albert Finney, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jacqueline Bisset). The best parts of the film are in its opening half-hour, when they gather aboard the train in Istanbul and get ready for departure: once the train gets snowbound and the big murder occurs, the enclosed space seems not a little claustrophobic as Hercule Poirot (Finney, in disfiguring make-up) rounds up and interviews the suspects.

The film is immeasurably helped by its famous score by Richard Rodney Bennett and by its brilliantly disturbing pre-title sequence explaining the sensational kidnapping and murder of a wealthy Scottish colonel's daughter that predetermines all the film's later events, and which all by itself is genuinely one of the greatest sequences in Seventies film. The sequence beautifully establishes an air of evil and chaos that haunts the rest of the film long afterward.