For example, Odom Jr's Dr Arbuthnot endures racist jibes from a fellow passenger, while he is involved in a dual-heritage relationship with Daisy Ridley's governess Mary Debenham – something that Poirot himself comments will make life difficult for them because of the racist mores of the time. In one sense, these may seem like small tweaks, but they were important symbolically.Īt the same time, however, the film uses these amendments to tackle themes of racism and xenophobia head on. It began with a scene featuring a black policeman, played by Paapa Essiedu, while among the guests enjoying the luxury of the famous train were Dr Arbuthnot, an African-American doctor and former army sniper (played by Leslie Odom Jr), who was an amalgamation of two characters from the novel, an English colonel and a Greek physician and Cuban-American car salesman Biniamino Marquez, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, who again was Branagh's invention, adapted from the Italian character Antonio Foscarelli. In Murder on the Orient Express, Branagh notably tried to update the source material in this respect, both through casting and the substance of the script.
The question is therefore: how do you translate and update Agatha Christie – or not – for the modern age? Yet adapting Agatha Christie as mass 21st-Century entertainment is not without its complications: they are products of the time they were written in, the mid-20th Century, and arguably reflect some unsavoury attitudes not least when it comes to racism, xenophobia and colonialism. The appeal of these films? Well, that may be obvious: the chance to see ensembles packed with A-listers waltzing about in glamorous locations in service of a gripping plot. Now, five years later, and after many Covid-related delays, comes his take on another Poirot novel, Death on the Nile, released in cinemas last week.
In 2017, Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of one of her most celebrated novels, Murder on the Orient Express, in which he also starred as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, hit big at the box office, grossing more than $350 million worldwide on a budget of $55 million. In modern Hollywood, amid all the hot intellectual properties, from Marvel superheroes to Mattel toys, the lucrative potential of one British author stands out: murder-mystery queen Agatha Christie.
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