Ev'rytime We Say Goodbye: Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, 2013

All month long, we're celebrating the Queen of Crime as she and her works appeared on screen, with a grand finale of five Murder on the Orient Expresses the first full week of November. Next week is Miss Marple Week, but today, we conclude our look at the main source of her bread and butter, the little Belgian himself, Hercule Poirot.  

The history of Hercule Poirot on screen has been, as we've seen throughout this week, quite a rollercoaster. Whether they were comical, Oscar-nominated, prolific, animated, or meta, each Poirot received equal amounts praise and criticism. Maybe Christie was right in her initial assessment of bringing Poirot to the stage: maybe he was too much on the page for an actor to do proper justice.

And then came David Suchet.

Casting Coup Month: Barry Lyndon

NOMINATIONS

Best Picture

Best Director - Stanley Kubrick

Best Adapted Screenplay - Stanley Kubrick

Best Cinematography - John Alcott (WON)

Best Art Direction-Set Decoration - Ken Adam/Roy Walker/Vernon Dixon (WON)

Best Costume Design - Ulla-Britt Soderlund/Milena Canonero (WON)

Best Music, Adaptation and/or Song Score - Leonard Rosenman (WON)

My last Retrospective was a direct result of Barry Lyndon. Last May, my place of employment -- the ArcLight Hollywood, home to the world-famous Cinerama Dome -- was snubbed for the releases of The Avengers and Dark Shadows. With this two-week drought, we brought out the big guns: classic films screening in our biggest theater: Doctor Zhivago (missed it), 2001: A Space Odyssey (missed it), Gone with the Wind, The Shining, a lot of others...and this. I caught Barry Lyndon with a friend after we screened Gone with the Wind, which was really quite risky considering one's three hours and the other four. But it mattered not: while I already was firmly in the Gone with the Wind, I found another great love in Barry Lyndon.