Agatha Christie's Poirot - Season 1 (1989) (season)
Directed by:
Renny RyeScreenplay:
Russell MurrayCinematography:
Peter JessopComposer:
Christopher GunningCast:
David Suchet, Hugh Fraser, Philip Jackson, Pauline Moran, Richard Howard, Tony Aitken, Charles Pemberton, Geoffrey Larder, Denys Hawthorne, Holly De Jong (more)Plots(1)
Poirot is dining out at a London chop house one evening when eminent artist Henry Gasgcoine enters the restaurant for his customary dinner. The next morning, Poirot is intrigued to read in the newspaper that the painter has been found dead. When a post-mortem reveals that Gasgcoine died after eating only a little food, Poirot concludes that the man he saw dining in the restaurant could not have been Gasgcoine at all. (iTunes)
(more)Reviews (2)
Like The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly, Four and Twenty Blackbirds is a rather mediocre whodunit in which the obvious identity of the perpetrator and, to some extent, the predictability of the plot is a stumbling block, especially due to the smaller cast of characters and the (possible SPOILER!) "badly done make-up" (end of possible SPOILER!).
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Identity exchange simply belongs to detective stories, that's clear. What I like about this one is that it's immediately clear from the beginning that such an exchange has taken place, but what's actually more interesting is the fact of who replaced the person in question and why. In this case, it works very well, and despite the slow pace, the story is sufficiently intriguing.
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