Jonny
When Luke Williams meets an eccentric old English woman on the train and she tells him she knows of three murders and she is subsequently murdered, I felt that the film had started well and was likely to develop into a good whodunit. Unfortunately, it was down hill from there on.With one exception, the suspects are wooden, providing little other than simply having a list of suspects to consider. The exception is Bridget Conway, the object of the Luke Williams' desire. Attractive as she (Lesley-Anne Down) is though, there is a limit to how often I want to see close ups of her facial expressions.The plot - will Bridget Conway prove to be the murderer damming Luke Williams hopes or will it be someone else? - first stumbles along and then grinds its way to an inevitable slushy conclusion.
tedg
My heavens.One thing I like, absolutely find hypnotizing, is how the classic detective stories get munged around. Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie are the ones that I want to follow. Now that there is new twist — probably a whole rope walk — on Sherlock coming, I wanted to check this out. It had a comparatively big budget, and some named actors, but not in their finer phases. It is roughly based on Christie in terms of the setup and mystery. But there is no real mystery. How it messes up in this department is uninteresting.But it has a detective that is roughly placed between Poirot and Marple. This is the truly bizarre part. This detective is an MIT professor, presumably a genius, right? He follows the TeeVee version of mathematical logic, which is based on a simple notion of "calculating the probabilities." Its a bit of a hoot, because it takes the detecting, the narrative richness of projecting in the future, into other folks' minds, into a mechanical exercise.It is precisely the opposite of what advanced mathematical logic is all about. In fact, I've been thinking about Terrence Malick recently. I encountered him as an MIT professor, wondering about what the relationship of future is to past. It is, in a way an extension of the concerns of a detective. It has nothing to do with probability, instead about understanding causality instead of measurement.It means that for me this is a particularly disturbing version of the genre, a genre that has a particularly intelligent origin. I feel like I'm in bigfoot territory.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
gridoon2018
"Murder is Easy" begins promisingly enough, with the charming Helen Hayes boarding a train to London, where she plans to reveal to the Scotland Yard the identity of a serial killer above suspicion in her quiet little village. Unfortunately, she gets killed about 10 minutes in, and we're stuck with the bland Bill Bixby as our lead for the rest of the movie. Bixby's character acts like an amateur sleuth, but he barely figures out one thing right in the entire movie! With the exception of the lovely Lesley-Anne Down and the dependable veteran Olivia de Havilland, the rest of the cast is forgettable and their characters underdeveloped. The direction is flat. However, there is one very well-done bit towards the end: a confrontation between 2 characters who keep talking to each other suggestively, and the viewer knows that one of them is the killer but NOT which one, and only after the whole thing is over do we find out the truth. Those 5 minutes, and the 10 featuring Helen Hayes, cannot fully compensate for the dullness of the other 80, though. (**)
BaileySEA
Murder is Easy (based on the novel Murder is Easy aka Easy to Kill) differs from the Agatha Christie novel in that the amateur sleuth Luke Fitzwilliams is changed to American Luke Williams for American TV-Movie reasons. Aptly so, that an American actor (Bill Bixby) could assume the role. Having said that, it is fitting to say that Murder is Easy is a wonderful adaptation for television. Old-time greats Olivia De Havilland and Helen Hayes have some nice spots as British spinsters Honorea Waynflete and Lavinia Fullerton. Other Brit stalwarts Timothy West, Shane Briant, Lee Lawson, and the stunningly beautiful Lesley-Anne Down round out the great cast. Also in an early role was Jonathan Pryce (Pirates of the Caribbean) as Mr. Ellsworthy. Bill Bixby is adequate, but Olivia De Havilland is very engaging in one of her latter day roles as Miss Waynflete, as is the great Helen Hayes as Miss Fullerton. Wonderful English countryside scenery, a great cast and an engaging story are more than enough reasons to view this movie over and over again.
AD
