Poirot - The Movie Collection, Set 2 (Murder on the Links / Hickory Dickory Dock / Dumb Witness / Hercule Poirot's Christmas)
Supersleuth Hercule Poirot bets his beloved mustache that he can solve a murder more quickly than a truculent French detective in this excellent collection of four movies based on Agatha Christie mysteries. The bet takes place inMurder on the Links; a body found on a golf course points to a crime committed years before--but the real question is, has Poirot's good friend Captain Hastings (Hugh Fraser) found true love? Similarly, though the twisty plot ofHickory Dickory Dockrevolves around diamond smuggling and a death in a student hostel, for many fans it's the story in which Poirot's ever-precise secretary Miss Lemon (Pauline Moran, nowhere near as ugly as Christie's description of the character) makes a rare mistake. InDumb Witness, a fox terrier gives Poirot the final insight to catch the killer of a wealthy woman, cutting through the seance-crazed antics of a pair of eccentric old sisters. But perhaps the best of the quartet isHercule Poirot's Christmas, featuring a sexy Spanish spitfire, a vengeful marked woman, and one of the most unsavory victims in all of Christie's work. Through it all, fastidious and scrupulously observant, Poirot sifts through the slippery details and comes to his unerring conclusion. As the Belgian detective, David Suchet has taken a character who could easily be a cartoon or a cardboard cutout and made him three-dimensional and sympathetic. One starts to wonder, what is his home life like? Does he grow lonely? Such musings are the mark of a truly vivid performance; Suchet never fails to drive each movie forward, step by irrevocable step. (The extras are meager; filmographies, sketchy biographies, and odd bits of trivia.)--Bret Fetzer