Agatha Christie’s Poirot: Complete Cases Collection DVD Box Set

Editorial Reviews
Spanning 25 years and the entire Poirot canon, David Suchet s iconic portrayal of Agatha Christie s famous Belgian detective has been hailed as one of TV s greatest achievements (Telegraph, U.K.). These 70 episodes of the hit mystery seen on public television are rich with period detail and feature some of film and television s brightest stars, including Michael Fassbender, Emily Blunt, Jessica Chastain, Damian Lewis, Tim Curry, Iain Glen, Christopher Eccleston, Aiden Gillen, Peter Capaldi, Lindsay Duncan, Hugh Bonneville, and many more.

Follow Hercule Poirot and his little grey cells from his very first case to his final curtain call. This 33-disc set includes all 13 series of the beloved mystery, remastered and restored to original U.K. broadcast order.

BONUS FEATURES: Being Poirot documentary: David Suchet reflects on 25 years as Poirot while filming his final episodes, plus bonus interviews with Suchet and Agatha Christie s grandson, Mathew Prichard (51 min.); Super Sleuths (47 min.): Documentary about the series featuring the stars and crew; David Suchet on the Orient Express (47 min.): A tour of the Orient Express and its history; behind-the-scenes featurette (46 min.), photo galleries, and production notes by David Suchet and Tim Curry; companion booklet with articles by David Suchet and Mathew Prichard; episode synopses; character profiles; information about Poirot; and Poirot s obituary

Product details
Actors: David Suchet
Format: Color, Dolby, Widescreen, PAL
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Region: Region 4 for Australia
Number of discs: 33
Studio: ACORN MEDIA
DVD Release in: 2014

TV Review: Agatha Christie’s Poirot

TV Review: Agatha Christie’s Poirot

A couple of months ago, it was announced, to the dismay of Poirot fans everywhere, that this lovely little British TV show was airing its 13th and final season. After 19+ years and 67 cases.

As a fictional detective, a fastidious, eccentric little Belgian detective solving predictable mysteries in pre-WWII England may not be a match for the dashing, modern-day Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Who. However, none of the fine actors in the latter two shows can match the dramatics of the supreme David Suchet, who has now played Poirot longer than any of the actors who played him before: Peter Ustinov, Albert Finney, et al. The brilliance of Suchet’s portrayal is in how he has chosen to stay completely faithful to Christie’s novels.

TV Review: Agatha Christie’s Poirot

A couple of months ago, it was announced, to the dismay of Poirot fans everywhere, that this lovely little British TV show was airing its 13th and final season. After 19+ years and 67 cases.

As a fictional detective, a fastidious, eccentric little Belgian detective solving predictable mysteries in pre-WWII England may not be a match for the dashing, modern-day Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Who. However, none of the fine actors in the latter two shows can match the dramatics of the supreme David Suchet, who has now played Poirot longer than any of the actors who played him before: Peter Ustinov, Albert Finney, et al. The brilliance of Suchet’s portrayal is in how he has chosen to stay completely faithful to Christie’s novels.

This is also why the show is titled “Agatha Christie’s Poirot.” There are several interviews about how Suchet prepared for the role by reading everything Christie had written about Poirot, how he worked hard to keep all the little details, the foibles, the idiosyncrasies straight. I have also enjoyed this collection of behind the scenes videos – both about Christie as well as the TV show — as they shed light on the meticulous research, preparation and thought that has gone into each episode by the many people involved.

Poirot was so well-loved, despite his annoying, self-centered pomposity, that, when Christie finally released her last novel, Curtain, killing him off after more than 5 decades, he received a front-page obituary on August 6, 1975 in the New York Times. He might be the only fictional character to have achieved this dubious honor. [Aside: When she first started writing Poirot, he was already an older man and she had no idea, per her autobiography, that she would write about him for so long. In real-life years, Poirot would have been well over a hundred by the last novel, especially as she wrote it in the 1940s and locked it away till 1974.]

Poirot mysteries were sometimes very similar. One common plot type involved a family member poisoning another family member either for inheritance or to keep them from spilling some scandalous secret. Often, there was a second murder to silence a character who had stumbled onto the truth. And, almost always, there was a big tableau gathering at the end where the great detective would bring all the suspects together and slowly unravel each one’s motivations and secrets till it was clear to everyone who the real murderer among them all was. More often than not, the families, murderers and victims were from the glamorous British upper-classes. And, while this did rather pander to the reader appetite at the time for high-society scandals, actual socio-political events and happenings rarely made their way into a story. I haven’t quite figured out whether this is because Christie wanted Poirot’s world to stay within certain bounds or whether she herself was not interested enough to write about what was, undoubtedly, a very interesting time for England between the two World Wars.

If you’ve watched or read enough of the more regular Poirot stories, you will typically have the murderer pegged before getting to the end – despite the intricate plotting. But, really, the whole point of these books and shows is not the fun of solving the whodunits. The pleasure of reading or watching Poirot is his full-on quirkiness, which is more heavily influenced by Dickens’ writing and characters than by Conan Doyle’s Holmes (although, of course, he’s there too).

For Christie to manage such intricate plotting with every novel and keep her stories straight was an amazing feat, when you consider how prolific she was and how many characters she created in total throughout her books – stereotypical though many of them were. Many “real” people, including herself and her husband, found their way into the books too. She was not a literary writer by any means. But, she understood, better than many writers of her time, the importance of a thoroughly plotted story and the need for consistency and relevancy in details. We’ll get to her in more detail in a different post later.