Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the studio behind the 1966 film adaptation of The ABC Murders, released under the title The Alphabet Murders. Its production history also included an abandoned version that fell apart before shooting, after Agatha Christie objected to a proposed scene involving Hercule Poirot.

The 1966 Film

More than thirty years after the novel’s first publication, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made the film at its English studio in Elstree, near London. American director Frank Tashlin, known for comedies including The Paleface and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and for work on Bugs Bunny cartoons, shaped the adaptation as visual comedy. Tony Randall played Hercule Poirot, Robert Morley played Arthur Hastings, and the cast also included Anita Ekberg, Maurice Denham, and Austin Trevor, who had portrayed Poirot in films in the 1930s.

The screenplay by David Pursall and Jack Seddon departed so far from the novel that the account characterizes it as a travesty. The film also featured guest appearances by Margaret Rutherford and Stringer Davis, familiar from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s four Miss Marple films earlier in the 1960s; Pursall and Seddon had scripted three of those films as well. The adaptation thus connected the studio’s earlier Christie-related screen work with a new production, while turning a murder mystery into a comic vehicle.

The Abandoned Production

Before the 1966 film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had planned a different version, to be directed by British filmmaker Seth Holt and starring American comedian Zero Mostel as Hercule Poirot. That project came to grief on what should have been its first day of shooting. Agatha Christie strongly objected to the script, which included a bedroom scene for Poirot, and the planned production was abandoned.

The contrast between the two projects is central to the studio’s adaptation history: the first collapsed before filming over Christie’s objection to the screenplay, while the later production reached the screen after recasting the material as visual comedy. The evidence identifies the objection and the scene at issue, but does not establish that the abandoned project’s cancellation led directly to the later film.