Bill Bixby shed his image of "My Favorite Martian" to portray an American on holiday in England who naturally stumbles into the typical Ms. Christie mystery of who-did-it.Even with a great cast, the film suffers from being way too talky. The dialogue is often quite boring and the characters are exactly this way as well. You reach the point where you don't really care who has been committing all these dastardly murders.Each character appears to be quite stilted. The bodies tend to pile up quite rapidly and yet there is little to no action.The guessing game intensifies during the last 10-15 minutes but by then, you just couldn't care less.Olivia De Havilland brings us another seemingly Melanie Hamilton like performance, but much older of course. However, she can be as devious as she was in "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte," (1964)Leslie Ann Down is interesting as the woman that everyone wants to suspect.

Agatha Christie's 1939 story has been updated to the Eighties and it's hero/protagonist made an American allowing for the casting of Bill Bixby as Luke Williams, mathematical genius and computer programmer. He takes a fateful ride on a British commuter train and meets up with Helen Hayes who has an important errand to run.Helen's a talkative old biddy who is worried that there have been a number of strange deaths in her small village recently and she fears that village constable Freddie Jones isn't quite up to a homicide investigation. She's confides in Bixby and then gets run down by a hit and run driver as she leaves the train.Bixby's mathematical mind can't take in the random probabilities of all this coincidence and it intrigues him. He goes back to Hayes's village and turns detective, annoying village constable Jones, but finding romance with Lesley Anne Down and a host of suspects and a couple more deaths before the mystery is solved.Among other inhabitants at the village is the local librarian Olivia DeHavilland and Timothy West who owns several newspapers. It's a pity that the story called for Helen Hayes to be killed off immediately so there could be no scenes with DeHavilland and Hayes.As this story was written in 1939 I suspect that Agatha Christie had Lord Beaverbrook in mind for Timothy West's character. Audiences in 1982, especially American ones couldn't possibly appreciate the satire that Christie was employing with West as the tyrannical ego-maniacal newspaper publisher. Still I suspect citizens of the United Kingdom of the older generations knew quite well who West's character was modeled on.I don't think the updating especially hurt the story however. The cast does very well by their roles and it's an intriguing film and idea that Helen Hayes voices.

... and worlds apart from the dire new UK TV versions. Bill Bixby is attractive, charming, funny and vulnerable. Lesley-Anne Down is beautiful and her outfits are... interesting, especially her loungewear. But should she really sleep in so much make-up? They're surrounded by a solid cast: Leigh Lawson, Anthony Valentine, Timothy West, Helen Hayes, Olivia de Havilland (but surely that's not her voice?). Shane Briant makes a wonderfully creepy doctor - what happened to him? What makes this film so good, tho, is that it sticks quite closely to Christie's book, and Tells The Story, something that the present gang of Christie pirates seem to think is far less important than appalling overacting by self-congratulatory thesps. One thing missing from this version is the present-day witchcraft theme that's present in the book. (Ellsworthy has sinister visitors who congregate in the woods at night and slaughter small animals in sinister rituals, making him more of a genuine suspect.)

Bill Bixby, not actually turning into the Incredible Hulk, tries to solve the deaths of citizens in one of those quaint English villages where murderers seem to thrive. A nice fair adaption of a fun Christie book with pretty Leslie Anne and a hefty Olivia huffing and puffing thru the scenery. She's a wicked gas here.