Stage and screen star Zero Mostel was so keen to play mystery writer Agatha Christie's inimitable Belgian detective Hercule Poirot that he relinquished his leading role in the mega-successful Broadway production of A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum to prepare for the opportunity. Dissatisfied with the adaptation of Christie's 1935 novel The A.B.C. Murders by David Pursall and Jack Seddon (who had already scripted three films around Christie's spinster sleuth Miss Jane Marple, starring Margaret Rutherford), Mostel demanded the right to rework the screenplay himself but Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer recast the part instead. Reinventing the meticulous/fastidious Poirot as an Inspector Clouseau-style bumbler (Blake Edwards' A Shot in the Dark, starring Peter Sellers in his second go-round as Clouseau, had been one of the most successful releases of 1964) was Tony Randall; best known at the time as the comic relief in a handful of Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies, Randall was emerging as a tenable leading man in his own right, in such films as Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) and The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964). Even more so than had the Miss Marple films, The Alphabet Murders inclined sharply toward broad comedy, with director Frank Tashlin encouraging Randall and costar Robert Morley to ad lib their scenes together. Thrown in for an additional laugh is a cameo by an uncredited Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple but easily missed is the appearance of British character actor Austin Trevor, who had been thirty years earlier the first actor ever to portray Hercule Poirot on film.

By Richard Harland Smith