YMMV / Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

• Angst? What Angst?: Poirot cavalierly gives the group a choice to confess or accept his alternative explanation. They choose the latter and celebrate in relief.
• Awesome Music:
  • Just try to watch the scene of the train departing from Istanbul without getting absolute chills from Richard Rodney Bennett's stirring waltz theme.
  • Not to mention, the haunting string music that plays over the Distant Prologue really conveys the horror of the events around Daisy's murder without showing any violence.
• Complete Monster: Lanfranco Cassetti is a notorious murderer and blackmailer who kidnaps people, murdering them when the authorities close in but still collecting the ransoms, Cassetti was the murderer of a little girl named Daisy, having continued to exploit her family days or even weeks after he had already killed the girl. Uncaring of how this killed four innocent people, from Daisy's mother dying from grief in premature labor with her new baby, to her father's suicide and an innocent maid killing herself when she was falsely accused of complicity, Cassetti cares only for escaping justice and was so evil that even the heroic Poirot feels obliged to cover for his killers.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Distant Prologue montage, depicting the kidnapping and murder of three-year-old Daisy Armstrong. Imagine being a parent and watching that.
  • Richard Widmark's sleazy, menacing performance as Ratchett/Casetti. With just a few minutes of screentime, he convinces you that this character is capable of murdering a child.
• One-Scene Wonder: Ingrid Bergman won an Academy Award for her role as the half-crazy Swedish missionary Greta Ohlsson, who is practically only seen onscreen during a seven minute near-monologue. Bergman herself, however, said that Valentina Cortese should've won. This trope applies to nearly everyone in the film; with the exception of Poirot, Dr. Constantine, and Bianchi, who interrogate each passenger and the conductor, no one has more than three scenes. Just the same, every actor gives a full movie's performance in their 7 minutes on-screen.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Pierre Michel being revealed to be the father of Paulette and breaks down crying remembering her suicide.
  • Greta Ohlsson's Berserker Tears when she stabbed Ratchett among the others.

---