Murder on the Orient Express and the Unofficial-Detective Film

It is commonplace to observe that films noirs, whose criminals are
amateurs, differ in crucial ways from gangster films, whose criminals
are professionals. It is equally true that the different kinds
of character who are called on to solve crimes – officials of the justice
system like lawyers or the police, licensed private detectives who
make their living investigating crimes, unofficial detectives who work
neither for the justice system nor as salaried independent contractors
– emphasize problems so different that they generate distinctive
subgenres within the crime film. Films featuring officers of the justice
system are organized around problems of institutional justice (What
should society do with suspected or convicted criminals?), films featuring
private investigators around problems of professionalism and
masculinity (What sort of man makes the best detective?), and films
featuring amateur detectives around problems of knowledge (What is
the solution to the mystery?).

Throughout the century since the vogue of Sherlock Holmes, unofficial
detectives have played a leading role in the history of the detective
story. Although Edgar Allan Poe had produced the first detective
story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” as early as 1841, it was
the Holmes stories – A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of the Four
(1890), and especially the series of short stories Arthur Conan Doyle
published in the Strand, beginning with “A Scandal in Bohemia” in
1891 – that provoked a torrent of imitators in England and America
who first made the detective story an established literary genre. The
Holmes formula pitted a heroically eccentric detective not so much
against a criminal (Holmes’s best-known criminal quarry, Professor
Moriarty, appears directly in only one of his sixty cases) as against a
baffling mystery. The detective, by dint of close observation and a
sharp analytical mind, makes a series of logical inferences that lead
him or her ahead of the official police to the criminal. To the figure of
the idiosyncratic unofficial detective, the so-called Golden Age of the
British detective story – represented between the two world wars by
the likes of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers – added a stylized,
enclosed setting (typically an English village or country house) and a
strong emphasis on baroque, ingenious mysteries. In the work of the
Anglo-American mystery writer John Dickson Carr, these mysteries
often took the form of puzzles so intricately clued that their explanations
required footnotes referring back to earlier passages. How could
a man have been strangled in the middle of a wet tennis court by a
murderer who walked away from the scene without leaving footprints?
How could a murderer make a loaded gun leap from its wall mount
and kill someone else? How could a man threatened by his long-dead
brother be shot to death alone in a guarded room, and a third brother
be fatally shot at close range in the middle of a deserted street? In novels
like The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939), The Man Who Could Not
Shudder (1941), and The Three Coffins (1935), Carr posed one impossible
crime after another for readers alert enough to follow the chain
of evidence to solve. In America, the pseudonymous Ellery Queen
(Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee) made the invitation to readers interested
in following the evidence explicit in a series of novels beginning
with The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), each featuring a “Challenge
to the Reader” before the closing chapters that asked readers to solve
the crime on the basis of logic and the evidence before the detective
announced his or her own solution. These novels, like those of Carr
and the American S. S. Van Dine, were often illustrated with floor plans
of the murder chamber or line drawings showing how a room could
be locked from outside by an enterprising criminal. In a series of
“Crime Dossiers” published in the 1930s, Dennis Wheatley went even
further, including such bits of physical evidence as spent matches,
locks of hair, and scraps of bloodstained draperies for readers to
comb for clues. Even after fads like footnotes, Queen’s “Challenge to
the Reader,” and the “Crime Dossiers” passed, the unofficial-detective
story remained for many years primarily a logical conundrum, like a
crossword puzzle for detectives and their brainier readers to solve.1
Throughout this period, many fictional detectives were brought to
the screen. Sherlock Holmes led the field in 1903 in the American Mu-
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 171
toscope short Sherlock Holmes Baffled. The American actor-playwright
William Gillette’s stage play Sherlock Holmes was filmed with Gillette
(1916) and again with John Barrymore (1922), and by 1923 the hawknosed
detective had appeared in some fifty brief British adaptations
of Conan Doyle’s stories. With the coming of synchronized sound,
Holmes was joined in short order by S. S. Van Dine’s Manhattan aristocrat
Philo Vance (The Canary Murder Case, 1929), Agatha Christie’s
self-important Belgian Hercule Poirot (Alibi, 1931), Stuart Palmer’s vinegary
schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers (The Penguin Pool Murder,
1932), Ellery Queen’s logician Ellery Queen (The Spanish Cape Mystery,
1935), Rex Stout’s gargantuan Nero Wolfe (Meet Nero Wolfe, 1936),
and even the teenaged detective Nancy Drew, ghostwritten under the
name Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew, Detective, 1938).2 Most of these detectives
starred in a whole series of films during the 1930s and early
1940s; yet the formal detective story, the mystery organized as a puzzle
for the audience to compete with the detective in solving, never
achieved the eminence in Hollywood that it did on the printed page.
At the height of their popularity in bookstores, Philo Vance and Ellery
Queen were still largely restricted in their sleuthing to second features.
Even Sherlock Holmes, given new life by Basil Rathbone in Sidney
Lanfield’s elaborate 1939 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles,
soon declined to a series of wartime “programmers” directed by
Roy William Neill for Universal (e.g., Sherlock Holmes and the Secret
Weapon, 1942) before Rathbone was driven from the role by his accurate,
if overdue, fears of typecasting in 1946.

Although unofficial detectives have long been a staple of Hollywood
crime films, then, they have seldom been its most distinguished avatars.
No less an authority than Alfred Hitchcock averred to François
Truffaut that he had no appetite for detective stories “because as a
rule all the interest is concentrated in the ending.” The Master of Suspense
added, “I don’t really approve of whodunits because they’re
rather like a jigsaw or crossword puzzle. No emotion. You simply wait
to find out who committed the murder.”3 Even though many Hitchcock
films incorporate elements of the whodunit, and no filmmaker is identified
more closely, however misleadingly, with the mystery film, Hitchcock
only made one true detective story: the British talkie Murder!
(1930).

Hitchcock’s aversion to the formal detective story is best explained
by noting the ways in which the presence of a powerfully charismatic
detective hero like Sherlock Holmes and the emphasis on physical
evidence, logical inferences, and a puzzling mystery focused on the
single question “Whodunit?” give such detective stories a most un-
Hitchcockian spin. All crime films deal with violent disruptions in the
social order and threats to the safety of ordinary characters like Fury’s
Joe Wilson, whose dilemmas dramatize the audience’s own nightmares
of social and epistemological breakdown; but the dominance of
a heroic detective like Holmes goes far to counterbalance those threatening
elements by presenting a benevolent restorer of order, apparently
omniscient and omnipotent, who leaves an impression even
more powerful than the mysteries he solves. The opposition between
the mysterious crime and the heroic detective reveals a deeper polarity
at the heart of the whodunit between the entertainingly threatening
elements associated with the mystery and the reassuringly domestic
elements associated with the detective. The pleasure many readers
take in Sherlock Holmes, for example, has less to do with the tales’
incidental mysteries, which come and go from story to story, than
with the constant presence of Holmes and Dr. Watson, whose enduring
solidity provides a counterweight to the threat of mystery and violent
death.

The details of Holmes and Watson’s domestic life provide a pattern
for many unofficial detectives who follow. Holmes, who thinks of himself
as an ascetic scientist who has no interest in women, carries
traces of the aesthete as well: He plays the violin, uses cocaine, and
affects irregular hours and irregular companions. Watson, by contrast,
represents the most stolid strain of the good Englishman: loyal, courageous,
sentimental, and invincibly unimaginative. Their headquarters
at 221b Baker Street are so minutely described, from the fifteen steps
up to their landlady Mrs. Hudson’s second floor to the Persian slipper
for Holmes’s tobacco, that readers insisted the place must be real,
and sixty years after Doyle’s death, a Sherlock Holmes museum was
opened in what had heretofore been a fictional address.
All these domestic touches provide a countervailing weight to the
menace of criminal activity that predominates in most crime fiction.
The emphasis on the everyday rituals of the detective’s life allows the
stories to deal with the darkest threats imaginable – personal betrayal,
the theft of irreplaceable objects, unexplained violence, mysterious
death, the ultimate breakdown of logic and reason – within a formula
as sanitized as that of the comic strip or the weekly sitcom, the only
other surviving fictional modes that routinely depend on recycling the
same heroes from story to story. The ritual of reassurance begins with
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 173
the very presence of stock detectives protected from death or destruction
by the guarantee that they will return in the next installment,
and continues in each fetishized detail of the detectives’ domestic
lives that anchors the series against the vicissitudes of mystery, crime,
or history itself. So complete is the emphasis on the unchanging pole
of detectives’ cozy households, in fact, that even today mystery stories
solved by unofficial detectives are often labeled by their publishers
as “cozies,” often over the protests of their own authors.
The plots of these stories, whose emphasis on the class distinction
within a stable, enclosed society in which everyone knows everyone
else has made the formula a particular favorite among British authors,
are often as cozy as their heroes’ lives. The discovery of a beheaded
corpse that cannot be identified would be a grisly shock in real life;
yet the tone of Dorothy L. Sayers’s first novel, Whose Body? (1923), is
so facetiously literate that the headless corpse becomes an abstract,
cerebral puzzle, the opening move in a game of deception that will end
in the detective’s vanquishing the criminal by sheer force of intellect
and personality. The light, detached, often playful tone of Golden Age
British writers from E. C. Bentley to Georgette Heyer encourages readers
to follow the characters’ lead in treating even the most outré circumstances
as bloodless clues. Crime is no longer a danger to individuals
and an affront to society, but the pretext for an entertainingly
recondite mystery that can be solved by readers willing to suspend
their emotional commitments to the characters completely enough to
evaluate each of them clinically as possible suspects. Because the unofficial
detective has by definition no ties to the justice system,4 the
problems of legal justice can be waived, and criminals confronted with
the truth of their broken alibis and unsuccessful red herrings considerately
break down and confess, or even more obligingly commit suicide,
sparing the state the expense and the ethical questions a trial
might entail. This freedom from the more disturbing problems of menacing
violence and the more problematic issues of institutional justice
allows unofficial detective stories from The Thin Man (book and film,
1934) to Young Sherlock Holmes (film and novelization, 1985) to adopt
an optimistic, triumphalist, often broadly comic tone, with the detective’s
star power guaranteeing a happy ending.

Nowhere is the whodunit’s tendency to smooth the rough edges of the
crime story more obvious than in Sidney Lumet’s 1974 film version of
Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Christie’s novel, first
published in 1933 as Murder in the Calais Coach, had represented a
turning point in the career of her hero, Hercule Poirot, who, after his
retirement from the Belgian police, had enjoyed a career as a private
detective in novels from The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) to Thirteen
at Dinner (first published in Britain as Lord Edgware Dies, 1933).
Accompanied by his endearingly dense Watson figure, Capt. Arthur
Hastings, Poirot had repeatedly come out of retirement from his second
career to solve a wide variety of cases. Murder on the Orient Express,
however, finds him returning from a trip to the Mideast without
Hastings and turning his back on a paying client by refusing the American
businessman Samuel Ratchett’s commission to find out who has
been sending him threatening letters. When Ratchett is stabbed to
death in his berth on the exclusive trans-European train, Poirot is
urged to take charge of the investigation until the authorities arrive.
Lumet came to the film from a background of dramas that explored
the weight of the past and of social pressures on individual behavior.
His first film, the one-set drama 12 Angry Men (1957), plumbed the dynamics
of a jury whose members could not agree on a verdict in an
apparently routine case. Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) and The
Pawnbroker (1965) presented characters mired in long-standing family
struggles or Holocaust memories they could not escape. The caper
film The Anderson Tapes (1971) took a deterministic view of a newly
formed gang’s attempt to loot a posh Manhattan apartment building
even as its members were under surveillance by various government
agencies. The police hero of Serpico (1973) was an honest New York
cop battling corruption in his department as he was transferred from
one hostile precinct to the next. Lumet, however, seemed to approach
Murder on the Orient Express as a holiday from the agonizing ethical
dilemmas of his earlier films, an excursion preceding the close analysis
of morally flawed pillars of the justice system that would become
his hallmark in such later films as Prince of the City (1981), The Verdict
(1982), Q & A (1990), Guilty as Sin (1993), and Night Falls on Manhattan
(1997). Beginning with its art-deco credits, Murder on the Orient Express
announces itself as a vacation from the strenuous moral analysis
of other crime films – a respite marked by the persistent emphasis of
the reassuring pole of domesticity over the threatening pole of mystery
and violent death.5

The film might be taken as a textbook example of Hitchcock’s strictures
against the screen whodunit. Hitchcock had complained that
everything that happens in a whodunit is reducible to a mere prologue
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 175
to its climactic revelation of guilt. This revelation in Christie’s novel is
a high point of mystery’s Golden Age. Realizing that the presence of
so many characters connected with the unsolved kidnapping of little
Daisy Armstrong five years earlier cannot possibly be coincidental,
Poirot declares that the twelve suspects who have shared the fatal
coach with him and Ratchett are all guilty (or, more precisely, that
only one of the thirteen possible suspects is innocent): They have
constituted themselves a jury to punish a crime the justice system
could not. The novel is therefore powerfully inventive in a peculiarly
limited way. It is not notable for an extraordinarily unified or resonant
plot like Oedipus the King, or for any special inventiveness in the way
of incident, or even for ingenuity on the part of its criminal plotters.
The cleverness is Christie’s success in devising a rationale for her
mystery that, as G. K. Chesterton had urged, could be explained in a
few sentences and grasped in a moment. Forty years before Hollywood
would become notorious as the town where movies were outlined
on luncheon napkins, Christie had perfected the high-concept
mystery. Novel after novel that she published between 1920 and 1940
turned out to be organized around a single brilliant device for concealing,
then revealing, the criminal pattern; but with the exception of The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), whose narrator was unmasked as the
murderer, none of her concepts was more simple or successful than
the secret of Murder on the Orient Express.
The film follows Christie’s strategy of reducing the murder of Ratchett
(Richard Widmark) to the status of an intellectual game by revealing
early on that he was actually Cassetti, the criminal mastermind
behind Daisy Armstrong’s kidnapping and murder, marking him as a
victim not worth mourning – and incidentally gesturing slyly at the
checkered persona of Widmark, who had made his reputation by playing
a series of stylishly brutal hoodlums in films from Kiss of Death
(1947), his spectacular debut, to Pickup on South Street (1953). It departs
from Christie, however, in reframing her intellectual puzzle in
more overtly visual, and ultimately sociocultural, terms.
The very nature of Christie’s novel involves the containment of potentially
disturbing threats in an enclosed space. Whereas a filmmaker
like Elia Kazan might have opened the story’s setting beyond the single
railway coach, and a noir stylist like Robert Siodmak or Jules Dassin
might have emphasized the claustrophobic confines of the space,
Lumet’s approach is consistently decorative. He begins with a gauzy
prologue, a montage showing the 1930 kidnapping of little Daisy Arm-
strong (an event to which Christie’s novel only alludes), and proceeds
to a sumptuously designed opening of the present-day story five years
later, set mostly in the spacious, atmospheric train station at Istanbul
[Fig. 38]. The moments leading up to the Orient Express’s departure
for Europe are crammed especially full of exotic detail, as Lumet provides
passersby in turbans, burnouses, fezzes, yarmulkes, and Chinese
dress to mingle briefly with the stars. From the moment the train
pulls out of the station, however, the film becomes an exercise in oneset
cinema. Except for the exterior shots showing the train stuck in a
picturesque snowbank that makes it impossible for the investigating
authorities to reach it, every scene is structurally the same scene –
Poirot interrogating the suspects in Ratchett’s murder in a series of
midshots and close-ups – set against the same paneled interiors.
Lumet and his Oscar-nominated collaborators, production designer
and costumer Tony Walton and cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth,
deal with their opulent but static set by reframing the story in crucial
new ways. Lumet is much less interested in visual space as such than,
say, Orson Welles; instead he focuses on two centers of visual interest:
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 177
38. Murder on the Orient Express: The evocative sequence leading up to the
train’s departure. (Martin Balsam, Albert Finney)
the stars’ meticulously detailed costumes and their famous faces.
From starchy tweeds to flashy furs, the screen is filled with a parade
of extravagant period costumes; but it is the stars themselves who
consistently command attention [Fig. 39]. Following the lead of John
Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), which had dressed up
its mystery by putting well-known stars into impenetrably heavy disguise
for a teasing finale, Murder on the Orient Express assaults its audience
from almost the beginning with A-list star power. Many of its
stars – Vanessa Redgrave as unassuming Mary Debenham, Sean Connery
as bluff Colonel Arbuthnot, Wendy Hiller as ugly old Princess Dragomiroff,
Lauren Bacall as fur-draped American tourist Harriet Hubbard,
Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset as the Count and Countess
Andrenyi – are given showy entrance tableaux. Ingrid Bergman as missionary
Greta Ohlsson and John Gielgud as Ratchett’s butler, Beddoes,
are allowed star turns that won them British Film Academy awards
for their performances. Many of the roles are reshaped for, or by, their
performers. In an Oscar-winning turn, Bergman makes Christie’s colorless
Ohlsson a missionary who, since being “born backwards,” has
spent her life “teaching little brown babies more backwards than myself.”
Mrs. Hubbard is remade from a quietly rambling American dowager
to an obnoxious loudmouth to suit the aggressive talents of Bacall.
Anthony Perkins as Hector MacQueen, Ratchett’s secretary, is playing
a thinly disguised version of his indelible screen persona, Norman
Bates.

This emphasis on star power goes far beyond visually showcasing
the film’s cast. By shifting attention from the characters to the stars
who play them, the film displaces the whodunit’s dualistic approach
to character (everyone seems smilingly innocent, but since one person
must be a dissembling murderer, everyone is suspect) onto a
more reassuring dichotomy between actor and role. The film’s advertising
posters exploited this dichotomy even before the audience arrived
in the theater by asking the question, “Can Ingrid Bergman commit
murder?” When Colonel Arbuthnot, stung by Poirot’s suspicions
of such a “woman” as Mary Debenham, retorts witheringly, “Miss Debenham
is not a woman – she’s a lady,” the implied question that arises
is not whether Miss Debenham is really a lady, but whether a lady can
really commit murder. By confounding its characters with the actors
and actresses who play them, the film consistently shifts questions of
innocence and guilt from personal, psychological terms to the more
broadly cultural, visually accessible terms of social class, public persona,
and celebrity framed by its status as star vehicle.6
This reframing of the story’s mystery by the terms of the film’s production
is echoed by its use of its period setting. Christie’s novel – obviously
inspired by the 1932 kidnapping of the baby of Charles Lindbergh,
the aviator whose 1927 solo flight over the Atlantic had made
him a hero – is set, like the film, in the early 1930s. Whereas Christie
treats her setting as unobtrusively contemporary, however, the film
emphasizes what has now become its remote historical period in a
thousand ways, through costumes, hairdos, interior decor, and quaint
vanished customs. The very presence of the anachronistic butler
played by the iconic Shakespearean Gielgud frames the film’s era
as reassuringly as the repeated shots of the locomotive’s belching
smokestack. To the novel’s original exoticism of place and class reassuringly
remote from those of its middle-class target audience, the
film thus adds the nostalgic framing of a remote historical period.
Even the film’s indirect allusions to the fatal Lindbergh kidnapping,
separated from its audience by forty years and a murder conviction,
become nostalgic in this context. This consistently archaeological
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 179
39. Murder on the Orient Express: Stars as scenery. (Jean-Pierre Cassel, Anthony
Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, George Coulouris,
Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts, Wendy Hiller, Colin Blakely, Michael
York, Jacqueline Bisset, Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam)
handling of the material broadens what might have seemed the limited
narrative interest of Christie’s whodunit, in which Poirot’s round
of interviews with the suspects is merely a prelude to his revelation
of who killed Ratchett, by making every knickknack, every cigarette
butt, every motive and gesture, every telltale scrap of evidence potentially
important not only as a clue to Ratchett’s murder but as a
window on a painstakingly re-created world.

The result of this exotic, visually decorative reframing of the mystery
is that the story’s denouement, which Christie had compressed
into a few revelatory sentences, now sprawls to nearly half an hour
in a sequence that dissipates the elegant central concept that makes
Christie’s novel a classic whodunit in favor of Poirot’s comprehensive
review of the often confusing visual evidence, dozens of brief flashbacks
showing clues the audience may have missed, and a longer
flashback of Ratchett’s murder presumably intended to satisfy 1970s
viewers’ greater appetite for violence. Despite its box-office success,
the film did not revive the formula of the classic whodunit; instead,
it inaugurated a new cycle of star-studded period whodunits, often
based on Christie’s novels (Death on the Nile, 1978; The Mirror Crack’d,
1980; Evil Under the Sun, 1982; Appointment with Death, 1988), in which
cadres of stars competed for the chance to upstage Christie’s highconcept
plots. In a final triumph of cultural embalming over the brainteasing
pleasures of the great whodunit series, these films, all of
whose settings were originally contemporary to their author and their
initial reading audiences, were invariably set in an upper-class past,
a Never-Never Land that might as well have been called the Agatha
Christie period [Fig. 40].
Though these films might seem to bear out Hitchcock’s criticism of
the puzzle mystery – they typically displace the intellectual concepts
(the narrator is the killer, all the suspects are in it together) with which
Golden Age writers domesticate their murderous plots in favor of a
continuous flow of eye-catching details (period trappings, exotic settings,
noteworthy casting choices) that domesticate the story’s threatening
elements still further – many of Hitchcock’s own films suggest
another approach to the mystery plot. Mystery films like Blackmail
(1929), Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), and Rear Window (1954) redefine
the balance between the normal life of the detective hero and
the crimes that interrupt it by the simple expedient of making the hero
an unwilling, personally involved detective. The difference is not be-
tween unofficial and official detectives but between habitual unofficial
detectives like Hercule Poirot and Nancy Drew and one-time detectives
like Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), the reluctant hero of The 39
Steps (1935).
If the presence and power of a continuing unofficial detective push
the mystery in the direction of the television sitcom, substituting
a one-time unofficial detective reverses that pattern, pushing the
mystery away from a domestic routine and toward melodrama and
suspense. Because there is no guarantee that the hero or heroine will
survive the film, the potential consequences of investigation become
much more deadly. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is betrayed by his
oldest friend in The Third Man (1949). Audio technician Jack Terri
(John Travolta) hears the woman he loves being killed in Blow Out
(1981). The investigator heroes of Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report,
1955), Don’t Look Now (1973), and The Parallax View (1974) are killed,
along with virtually the entire cast of And Then ThereWere None (1945;
remade twice as Ten Little Indians, 1966, 1975). In the most nihilistic
twist of all, the two assassins of Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964), who
also serve as investigators into the past of the man they have just
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 181
40. Death on the Nile: Different stars, but the same shot – a return to the
Agatha Christie period. (Simon MacCorkindale, Mia Farrow, Jack Warden, Maggie
Smith, Bette Davis, Jon Finch, Olivia Hussey, George Kennedy, I. S. Johar)
murdered, are gunned down at the end of the film, leaving most of
the main characters dead. Even when such films have happy endings,
their resolutions are inevitably more tentative than the endings that
Holmes and Poirot promised from the beginning. When the protagonists
of Klute (1971), Body Double (1984), and The Vanishing (1993) survive
the threatening criminals in their films, their survival is hard-won,
because they could just as easily have been killed.7

Whether or not one-time detectives are killed or suffer lasting harm,
the constant threat of danger gives their adventures a far less comic
and optimistic tone than the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Because
the hero is often forced to investigate the case by his or her own connection
to it, the investigation is marked by intimate emotional involvement
rather than aloof intellectual detachment. The mystery is
not a puzzle to be solved or a game to be played but a menace to the
detective and his or her loved ones, and the casting of suspicion on
one suspect after another calls into question the detective’s previous,
often long-standing relations with them all. Suspicion thus functions
not as an intellectual tease for a detective who has no personal stake
in which of a number of interchangeable suspects is guilty, but as an
expression of paranoia about which apparent friend is really a liar, a
betrayer, or a killer.

Instead of balancing the remote menace of crime against the detective’s
cozy domestic life, these films undermine any possibility of
domestic stability by tainting the domestic sphere with criminal elements.
Because the key witness in Klute is a threatened prostitute
whose household is a savage parody of the missing suburban husband’s
idyllic domestic circle, the investigation of her sordid life-style
turns into a searching critique of the suburban verities to which her
world was first opposed. Unlike whodunits like Sayers’s Gaudy Night
(book 1935; TV film 1987), which valorize the social and intellectual
snobbery of a closed collegiate circle by showing the calamitous results
of its tainting by a malicious interloper, mystery stories shorn
of larger-than-life continuing detectives and the domestic values they
represent accommodate a much more critical view of the social establishment.
Hence the unmarried, housebound photographer in Rear
Window, becoming obsessed with a neighbor who may have killed his
wife, may be rationalizing his own fears of marriage; and the rival
newspaper reporters chasing down leads to the serial killer in While
the City Sleeps (1956) are jackals willing to sacrifice anything, including
the women they love, for a crack at a corner office and another few
dollars a week.

Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) turns the conventions of the
unofficial detective story to typically subversive ends. The story revolves
around the visit of Charles Spencer Oakley (Joseph Cotten) to
his sister’s family in cozy Santa Rosa, California. Both his sister, Emma
Newton (Patricia Collinge), and his niece and namesake, Charlotte,
called “Charlie” (Teresa Wright), adore him, but the film begins to
drop increasingly emphatic hints that there is something wrong with
Uncle Charlie, until his niece’s trip to the newspaper file in the local
library reveals the truth about him: He has made his money as the
“‘Merry-Widow’ murderer,” a man who has romanced, robbed, and
murdered a series of wealthy widows.

Although Charlie functions as the unofficial detective of Shadow of
a Doubt, piecing together clues to her uncle’s criminal past, Charlie’s
lack of Poirot’s semiofficial status produces two vital differences from
whodunits like Murder on the Orient Express. Even though the police
are uncertain whether the Merry Widow murderer is Uncle Charlie or
another man they are pursuing in New England, Charlie’s story is not
really a whodunit, since she has access to damningly conclusive evidence
against her uncle that the police do not. Even before the film
makes it clear that Uncle Charlie is the killer they seek, the question
it poses is not “Whodunit?” but “What happened?” or “What’s the
matter with him?” The only character in the film to fall under suspicion
of wrongdoing is Uncle Charlie; the question is simply whether
those suspicions are justified, and what he has done to justify them.
The other difference is even more crucial. It is only the first half of
Shadow of a Doubt that is a mystery story. Once Charlie confirms her
suspicions about her uncle, the story shifts gears from puzzle to suspense
story, as Charlie’s panicky attempts to get her uncle to leave
Santa Rosa reveal her struggles in coming to terms with the man the
film has gone to extraordinary lengths to set up as her double. How
can Charlie turn on her uncle without denying part of herself? Is her
attempt to shield her mother from unpleasant publicity really an attempt
to disavow her own closeness to the uncle she cannot accept
any longer? How can she ever return to the sheltering safety of Santa
Rosa now that Uncle Charlie has invited her to see the world as “a foul
sty” and forced on her a nightmarish complicity with his guilt? Have
the unwholesome secrets she has shared with him poisoned her life
forever, as they would presumably poison those of the victims of incest
whom her nightmarish domestic dilemma (“don’t tell Mom”) constantly
evokes? These uncomfortable questions about the relation between
the detective and the criminal, which are at the heart of Shadow
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 183
of a Doubt, are all beside the point for Sherlock Holmes, who never
needs to confront the nature of his often surprisingly intimate relations
with criminals.

Forty years after Hitchcock’s microscope revealed small-town America’s
fascination with the charismatic criminal hero it could survive
only by destroying, David Lynch returned to the dark side of the suburbs
with Blue Velvet (1986), in which Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Mac-
Lachlan), called home from college by his father’s heart attack, discovers
the evil beneath the smiling surface of idyllic Lumberton, North
Carolina, where, according to a WOOD radio announcer, “people really
know how much wood a woodchuck chucks.” Writer-director Lynch
was already well-known for two cult favorites, the surrealistic shocker
Eraserhead (1977) and the scattershot science-fiction epic Dune
(1984), as well as for The Elephant Man (1980), which used its pitiably
deformed hero as a lightning-rod for Victorian hypocrisy.

If Murder on the Orient Express marks its director’s attempt to frame
a murder mystery in the most comfortably domestic terms possible
by embalming its characters in exotic period detail, in the faces of
well-known stars, and in a reassuringly remote historical past, Blue
Velvet marks its director’s most sustained attempt to emphasize the
polarity between the domestic and threatening terms in which such
stories can be framed. The film’s rigorous stylistic duality established
Lynch’s territory once and for all as the crossroads between the hyperreal
and the surreal, the intensely ordinary world and the realm
of nightmare. He would return to this familiar territory in the demented
road film Wild at Heart (1990), the Chinese boxes Lost Highway
(1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), and especially the groundbreaking
television series Twin Peaks (1990–1). All these projects confirmed
Lynch’s most recognizable trademarks as an extreme visual and auditory
stylization that weighted every moment of his stories with potential
meaning and menace, a motivic counterpoint between florid
melodrama and the apparently normal quirks of ordinary people, and
the repetition of banal images or dialogue tags to a frighteningly incantatory
point (as in Blue Velvet’s harrowing use of the Roy Orbison song
“In Dreams” and its repeated, prophetic line of dialogue, “It’s a strange
world”). To Murder on the Orient Express’s use of violent death as an
extraordinary event that temporarily disrupts the calm order of the
everyday world and provokes a teasing mystery the detective must
solve, Blue Velvet adds the sense of mortality as a condition that links
aggressor, victim, and detective in an unholy and disturbing economy
of desire. Death is everywhere in Lynch’s film, not because so many
people die, but because so many of them are blasted by the mortal
flaws that reduce them to a kind of death-in-life.
The film begins a world away from this dark vision, with cinematographer
Frederick Elmes’s montage of overexposed, deeply saturated
color shots designed to showcase the picture-postcard beauties
of Lumberton. As Bobby Vinton’s rendition of “Blue Velvet” substitutes
for the diegetic sound proper to the images, Lynch cuts from a
brilliant blue sky against which red roses are glowing to a fire engine
passing down the street, one firefighter waving in dreamlike slow motion,
to a second close-up of flowers and then to a crossing guard before
settling on a neat white frame house whose owner, Tom Beaumont
(Jack Harvey), is watering in the backyard with a garden hose.
Everything is perfect – until an unnoticed kink in the hose keeps Mr.
Beaumont from pulling it closer, and he claps his hand to his neck with
a silent cry and falls to the ground. As his nerveless hand continues
to clutch the hose, Lynch adds two macabre touches: a dog runs up
and drinks from the fountain of water, and an impossibly close trackin
to the grass reveals, courtesy of Elmes and sound designer Alan
Splet, the suddenly overwhelming sights and sounds of myriad insects
bustling and chomping in the alarmingly active world beneath
Mr. Beaumont.

Having already undermined perfect Lumberton as an idealized
world that maintains its pristine suburban image by denying the unpleasant
realities that coexist within its orbit, Lynch is ready to immerse
Mr. Beaumont’s son, Jeffrey, in the other world that opens before
him when he finds a severed ear crawling with ants in a vacant
lot near his home. Taking his gruesome discovery to his neighbor, Det.
John Williams (George Dickerson), he finds that although Williams
refuses to discuss the ear with him, his less circumspect daughter,
Sandy (Laura Dern), is happy to link it to a case involving Dorothy Vallens
(Isabella Rossellini), a nightclub singer who lives on the other
side of the tracks on Lumberton’s notorious Lincoln Street. When Jeffrey,
hungry for “knowledge and experience,” hatches a plan to break
into Dorothy’s apartment, Sandy demurs, but Jeffrey argues that they
will be protected by their spotless reputations. Dorothy’s languidly
erotic rendition of “Blue Velvet” in the Slow Club, where she performs
as “the Blue Lady,” does indeed seem to mark her as poles apart from
Jeffrey and Sandy, who have gone to watch her before carrying out
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 185
their plan; yet the heart of Blue Velvet is the relationship that develops
between Jeffrey and Dorothy, a relationship that begins even as Jeffrey
is watching her perform in the Slow Club. “I don’t know if you’re a detective
or a pervert,” Sandy says to Jeffrey as she drops him outside
Dorothy’s place at the Deep River Apartments. Jeffrey smirks: “That’s
for me to know and you to find out.” The choices between these two
alternatives are hopelessly muddled once Dorothy discovers Jeffrey
in her closet [Fig. 41] – where he has overheard a phone call she took
from Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) and Don, later revealed as her kidnapped
husband – forces him at knifepoint to strip, then quickly returns
him to her closet when Frank arrives to torment her in ways that
go far to explain her own alternately seductive and masochistic behavior
toward Jeffrey. Even after Frank has left, Jeffrey’s terror continues
when Dorothy rejects his tenderness – and his solicitous concern for
the husband and son who are shown in a photograph she keeps hidden
under her sofa – and begs him to hit her.
Jeffrey’s shockingly perverse sexual initiation destroys his peace of
mind because it prevents him from thinking of himself as simply one
of the good guys. The more completely Angelo Badalamenti’s disturbing
musical arrangements undermine the normal associations of the
visuals (as Jeffrey is mounting the dark stairs to Dorothy’s apartment
for a later rendezvous, a lighthearted Bobby Vinton is reprising “Blue
Velvet”) or ironically intensify them (as in the heavenly choirs that repeatedly
accompany Jeffrey’s romantic scenes with Sandy), the more
completely Jeffrey loses his sense of his own innocent identity. He cannot
go to Det. Williams with his suspicions that Frank has kidnapped
Dorothy’s husband and son in order to make her his sex slave because
he does not want to get Sandy (or himself) in trouble; he tells Sandy
that his world is shattered by the very existence of people like Frank;
and at the same time, though he is ever more closely to drawn to
Sandy, he cannot help returning to the fascinating and pitiable Dorothy.
Swearing that he wants only to help her, Jeffrey is soon seduced
anyway.

Sandy and Dorothy represent opposed and incompatible aspects of
Jeffrey’s sexual desire. Her blond hair, soft lighting, and pastel outfits
mark Sandy, who “both makes possible Jeffrey’s quasi-incestuous relationship
with Dorothy . . . and provides a safe alternative to it,”8 as
conventionally attractive, Jeffrey’s future suburban helpmeet, whose
appropriate musical accompaniment is teen ballads, the film’s subdued
theme music (which returns only during two scenes in which
she and Jeffrey are walking the streets of Lumberton together), or
weirdly uplifting liturgical music. When Sandy tells Jeffrey of a dream
in which a dark, loveless world was brightened by the arrival of thousands
of robins bearing “this blinding light of love,” her recitation
is accompanied by organ music from the church whose stainedglass
windows are framed in romantic soft focus behind her. Dorothy,
by contrast, is associated exclusively with forbidden sexuality. She
dresses entirely in black, red, or dark blue; her face, with its heavy
coating of rouge and lipstick, is as fetishized as her wardrobe, especially
in the extreme close-ups that repeatedly show her parted lips;
her deep, mournful voice bespeaks sex as a painful ritual to be suffered,
not consecrated in a church. No one would ever describe Dorothy,
as Jeffrey describes Sandy, as “a neat girl” with whom it would
be a pleasure to fall in love; she is rather the sex partner Jeffrey can
neither acknowledge nor resist.

The price of Jeffrey’s seduction becomes horrifyingly clear when
Frank catches him leaving Dorothy’s apartment and, in the film’s most
hallucinatory sequence, takes him for a joy ride with Dorothy and several
more willing friends, gloating to him, “You’re like me,” threatening
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 187
41. Blue Velvet: Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) about to come out of the closet at
knifepoint.

to kill him if he tries to “be a good neighbor to her,” and concluding:
“If you get a love letter from me, you’re fucked forever!” Smearing lipstick
on his own face, Frank kisses Jeffrey, gags him with the strip of
blue velvet, and beats him unconscious. What makes this sequence
so frightening is not only Frank’s brutality but the way he persistently
breaks down the psychosexual distinctions on which Jeffrey’s sense
of himself and his world depends. Frank, during his earlier visit to Dorothy,
had bridled when she called him “Baby,” insisting on being called
“Daddy”; yet moments later he was telling “Mommy” that “Baby wants
to fuck,” conflating in himself the roles of father and son, child and
adult, offspring and sex partner. In treating Jeffrey like Dorothy, Frank
is attacking the even more fundamental distinction between men and
women and revealing the terrifyingly unlimited aggression that stirs
his sexual appetite. As he declares exultantly to his drug supplier, Ben
(a bravura turn by Dean Stockwell), “I’ll fuck anything that moves!”
Face to face with the identifications with both Frank and Dorothy that
have been forced on him, Jeffrey spirals down into chaos. The moral
side of Jeffrey’s confusion surfaces when he goes to report his evidence
of Frank’s drug murders to Det. Williams and recognizes the
officer’s partner, Det. Tom Gordon (Fred Pickler), as Frank’s accomplice.
Can Jeffrey trust Williams himself, who has always been studiously
noncommittal in his reactions, and who wears a holstered gun
even around his home? The complementary perceptual side of Jeffrey’s
confusion is illustrated at key points in the film by the recurrent
visual image of a flickering candle (associated with Frank’s tag line,
“Now it’s night”), and the roaring sound associated first with the insects
under Mr. Beaumont’s back and later with Don Vallens’s severed
ear.

The ultimate sign of this chaos, and the sequence in which all the
different aspects of Jeffrey’s life he has struggled to keep separate collapse
into one another, comes when Jeffrey and Sandy leave a party
at a friend’s house and realize they are being followed by another car.
The driver who has been sounding his horn and ramming Jeffrey’s
convertible is not, however, Frank but Mike (Ken Stovitz), Sandy’s aggrieved
boyfriend, who simply wants to beat Jeffrey up for stealing his
girl. The collision between Frank’s monstrous evil and Mike’s smalltown
intrigue becomes complete when Mike catches sight of Dorothy
stumbling nude from around the corner of Jeffrey’s house and says in
stupefaction, “Is that your mother?” Driving off in confusion, he leaves
Jeffrey and Sandy to deal with Dorothy, who throws herself into Jeffrey’s
arms and calls out to him in despair as “my secret love.” The
power of this sequence depends not only on its horrifyingly funny
sense of anticlimax – Jeffrey is in danger not of being unmanned and
killed by a dangerous psychotic, but only of being punched out by a
high-school rival, and the sequence ends with Sandy, stung by the revelation
of Jeffrey’s relationship with Dorothy, slapping Jeffrey’s face –
but on its vertiginous sense of reframing. It is reassuring to find that
Jeffrey is not in real danger, but it would have been reassuring in its
own way to have the car chase framed by Jeffrey’s knowledge of Frank
and the generic expectations that knowledge would arouse. What is
far more disturbing is the presence of blankly contradictory contextual
frames that forestall the audience’s wish to know how they are
to interpret each threat and revelation.

The film’s climactic scene, in which Jeffrey returns to Dorothy’s
apartment to find both her husband and Frank’s partner-in-crime, Det.
Gordon, dead moments before Frank arrives on the scene, forces Jeffrey
to kill Frank in self-defense, completing his descent from Lumberton’s
overidealized suburban utopia to the acceptance of his own
mortality, his ability to kill the man who was about to kill him. Having
accepted his own dark side by killing Frank and acknowledging to
Sandy his desire for Dorothy, Jeffrey is ready for the impossibly happy
ending the film provides. A brightly lit scene back at the Beaumonts’
house shows Tom Beaumont, miraculously recovered, barbecuing in
the backyard with Det. Williams as their wives chat in the living room
and Jeffrey and Sandy scrutinize a robin, presumably a fulfillment of
Sandy’s prophetic dream of light and love, perched on the kitchen
window. But the robin’s meal, a large insect still protruding from its
mouth, is a reminder that even the most dreamlike landscapes are still
stippled with ugliness and death. This reminder is complemented by
the closing montage that complements its opening framing sequence:
another slow-motion shot of the passing fire engine, another close-up
of red roses against a blue sky, and finally a slow-motion shot of Dorothy’s
freed son, Donny, never before seen in the film, running playfully
to his mother as her mournful voice is heard singing the closing
line to the title song: “And I still can see blue velvet through my tears.”
Just as Jeffrey’s attempt to keep his position as amateur sleuth distinct
from the part of him that responded to the other side of the tracks
leads inevitably to his acknowledgment of the dark desires he shared
Murder on the Orient Express, Blue Velvet, and Unofficial-Detective Film 189
with Frank Booth, the film ends by disclosing that the dark secret at
the heart of Dorothy’s Deep River apartment is a woman moved by
courage, nobility, and maternal love.

The different terms in which they frame their mysteries put Blue Velvet
worlds apart from Murder on the Orient Express. Lumet’s film maintains
a strict opposition between detective and criminals; Lynch’s
everywhere announces their interpenetration. Lumet emphasizes specific
details of mise-en-scène over Christie’s high concept; Lynch is so
interested in the thematic import of his dualities that he neglects the
most elementary plot points. He never explains, for example, why Jeffrey
feels drawn to return to the climactic scene in Dorothy’s absence,
why the criminals had brought her kidnapped husband back, how Don
Vallens and Gordon had gotten killed, how Dorothy was able to escape
to appear at the Beaumonts’ house, or why Frank returned in disguise
to the apartment. More generally, Lynch offers no explanation for
Frank’s sexual pathology, and none for Dorothy’s other than her corruption
by Frank’s demands, or the bug-eating robin’s implication that
Frank’s brand of sexual terrorism is as natural as Jeffrey’s tenderness.
Murder on the Orient Express is driven by the visual possibilities of
clues to the characters’ cultural status, Blue Velvet by a nightmare logic
uninterested in clues except as triggers of nightmare associations
[Fig. 42].
Still, these films are linked by more than their detective figures, because
the nature of detection inevitably reveals the intimacy between
transgressors and avengers. Since Blue Velvet gives Jeffrey, like Shadow
of a Doubt’s young Charlie Newton, an evil double he can neither
acknowledge nor deny but only destroy, the film raises the question
of whether Jeffrey’s psychosexual nightmare, like Charlie’s, has been
a phenomenally aberrant experience or simply a parable for the normal
rite of passage to sexual maturity. When Charlie is reassured by
Jack Graham (Macdonald Carey), the police-detective-turned-suitor
who is Charlie’s safe alternative to Uncle Charlie, in the film’s celebrated
last line – that the world is “not quite as bad as that, but sometimes
it needs a lot of watching. It seems to go crazy every now and then,
like your Uncle Charlie” – is he suggesting that Uncle Charlie is a freak
of nature, a historical aberration like the contemporaneous Adolf Hitler,
or as natural a part of the order of things as Charlie and Graham?
It is a deeply subversive question for both the adult Charlie and the
audience.

Even Murder on the Orient Express ends by revealing the links between
detectives and criminals. Ratchett, the threatened victim who
first solicits Poirot’s help, is really a criminal himself. The innocent
suspects from whom Poirot must pick the criminal are all guilty. Their
shared guilt impeaches that order as criminal throughout. The detective
deputized to identify the criminal for the absent authorities instead
agrees to let them go, since the friend who authorized his investigation
agrees with him that the victim, not the killers, is the true
criminal. Even the film’s concluding tableau, a ritual series of toasts
among the passengers who have succeeded in killing Ratchett, celebrates
homicide rather than detection as the therapeutic restorer of
the social order thrown into chaos by the kidnapping of Daisy Armstrong.
Whether as spectacularly as Blue Velvet or as unobtrusively as
Murder on the Orient Express, the unofficial detective film, however resolutely
it separates the detective from the criminal, cannot help showing
how each lives in the other.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org