Evil Under the Sun (1982)

 'Evil Under the Sun' is an adaptation of the 1941 Agatha Christie novel of the same name. The story concerns a murder at an Adriatic island resort in the 1930's. Peter Ustinov plays the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, a role he would play around a half dozen times on both film and television, his take on the character is a little different from the now better known David Suchet and Kenneth Branagh versions and it took me a while to warm to it. To warm to the whole thing really, at first it felt very small scale BBC, but the film eventually opens up and becomes quite fun. It even has a sequence, establishing where all the characters are at a given time, which is perhaps my favorite in any Poirot film I've seen. The movies Cole Porter score really serves to elevate and enliven the whole thing. ***