David Suchet Movies
Known mostly for portraying Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot for more than a decade, the short and stocky character actor David Suchet has also enjoyed a lengthy career on stage, screen, and television. Born in London, he studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and eventually joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. Throughout the 1970s, Suchet appeared in numerous stage productions and crime dramas on British television. His did his first film in 1980 with A Tale of Two Cities, but didn't play his first detective until the crime comedy Trenchcoat in 1983. For the rest of the '80s, the British actor played a Middle Eastern terrorist in The Little Drummer Girl, a Russian operative in The Falcon and the Snowman, and a French hunter in Harry and the Hendersons. He also occasionally portrayed real-life figures, including Sigmund Freud in the miniseries Freud, news reporter William L. Shirer in the HBO docudrama Murrow, and movie legend Louis B. Mayer in RKO 281. While the Poirot mysteries would dominate his career in the '90s, Suchet also played some other leading roles: double agent Verloc in miniseries The Secret Agent, based on the novel by Joseph Conrad; Aaron in the TNT television special Moses; and downsized New Yorker Oliver in the American independent film Sunday. Some standard Hollywood action thrillers followed with Executive Decision, Deadly Voyage, and A Perfect Murder being just a few. After 2000, he turned to costume dramas to play Napoleon in Sabotage!, Baron von Stockmar in Victoria & Albert, and upper-crust Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now. He resumed the role of Poirot (after a short break from 1998-1999) just as he started up another detective character, DI John Borne of NCS: Manhunt and NCS 2. In 2003, he played gangster Leo Gillette in the action thriller Foolproof. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide- 1989
Just as Poirot is feeling at a loose end because he has no case to work on, there is a killing in the very apartment building where he is staying and he is soon in the thick of another investigation. ~ Mark Hockley, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- David Suchet
- 1989
Poirot investigates a case that at first appears to be a suicide, but he soon begins to suspect foul play, although proving it is far from easy. ~ Mark Hockley, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- David Suchet
- 1989
A leading businessman consults Hercule Poirot when he begins to have terrifying nightmares and finds that they have a more tangible significance as far as his well-being is concerned. ~ Mark Hockley, All Movie Guide
- 1989
Agatha Christie's creation Hercule Poirot is called in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a cook, but this is only the first of many strange events in a trail that ultimately leads to murder. ~ Mark Hockley, All Movie Guide
- 1989
- R
One of the first films by Polish director Agnieszka Holland to gain international acclaim, this drama is a joint French-American production based loosely on the real-life story of the dissident Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko. In the early 1980s, as the democracy and labor movement known as Solidarity was challenging Soviet authority in Poland, an outspoken priest, Father Alek (Christopher Lambert), defies martial law and continues to rally followers around the cause of Solidarity. The Soviet-controlled Polish government enlists a police official, Stefan (Ed Harris), to stop the priest. Stefan, a devoted party follower, finds that the only way he can silence Father Alek is to have him killed. Along the way, however, the priest has a profound influence on Stefan. Among those in minor roles are Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Pete Postlethwaite, and Tim Roth. Holland would go on to direct The Secret Garden and Washington Square. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Christopher Lambert, Ed Harris, (more)
- 1989
- PG
In this English drama, set during World War I, a strange, deaf man, known to all as "The Birdman" (Paul Scofield), must enlist the help of young Daniel Pender (Max Rennie) and Gracie Jenkins (Helen Pearce) to prevent the narwhal whales from suffering abuse at the hands of the local islanders. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Paul Scofield, David Threlfall, (more)
The great, and always perfectly attired Belgian private detective Hercule Poirot, who came to England in 1914 as a refugee, solves numerous puzzling mysteries in this series. Poirot and his sidekick Captain Hastings is one of mystery-writer Agatha Christie's best-loved characters, and this series remains faithful to her original character and his exploits. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Cinematographer Chris Menges' first directorial effort, A World Apart was inspired by the lives of South African journalist Ruth First and her daughter Shawn Slovo (who wrote the film's screenplay). Barbara Hershey plays the fictional counterpart to Ms. First, Diana Roth, with Jodhi May as her daughter. Told from the daughter's viewpoint, the film shows us that Diana and her husband Jeroen Krabbe are so busy with their anti-Apartheid political activism that they totally shut May out of their lives. In 1963, Hershey is arrested by the South African police, becoming the first white woman to be held under the infamous 90-day-detention act. Left despondent and suicidal by two separate arrests and by constant harassment from the police, Diana still won't include her daughter in her life until the girl presses the issue in a climactic confrontation. Some critics felt that Shawn Slovo was using A World Apart to settle unresolved issues in her own life: Ruth First was killed under suspicious circumstances in 1982, without ever reconciling with her daughter. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Barbara Hershey, Jodhi May, (more)
When the ailing husband of an adulterous wife is discovered bludgeoned to death and suspicions fall on the older woman's young lover, the newly widowed woman claims that it was she who was solely responsible for the death despite evidence that points to the contrary in this dramatic account of true-life 1935 trial that shocked all of England. Though notable evidence and strong suspicion suggests that the murder may have been of crime of passion perpetrated by the jealous lover only half her age, Alma Rattenbury (Helen Mirren) confesses to the murder of her husband and is soon brought to trial. Despite the fact that Alma is already being deemed guilty by the general public for her adulterous indiscretion alone, her lawyer, star attorney T.J. O'Connor (David Suchet), remains convinced that his client will eventually be cleared of all charges. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Helen Mirren, David Suchet, (more)
- 1987
Filmed in Portland, Oregon, The Last Innocent Man stars Ed Harris as an adroit criminal lawyer. Having gotten several obviously guilty clients off the hook, Harris suffers a conscience attack and takes a few months off to get his act together. He is pulled out of his sabbatical by his girl friend Roxanna Hart, who persuades Harris to take on one last case. The client is Hart's estranged husband (Darrell Larson), accused of killing an undercover policewoman. This time the client is blatantly innocent--but Harris utilizes his same old sneaky tactics to win an acquittal and even throws a few new underhanded techniques into the stew. Made for television, The Last Innocent Man premiered over the HBO cable service on April 19, 1987. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ed Harris, Roxanne Hart, (more)
While vacationing in the Pacific Northwest, the Henderson clan's dad George (John Lithgow), mom Nancy (Melinda Dillon), daughter Sarah (Margaret Langrick) and son Ernie (Joshua Rudroy) accidently run over a strange animal with their car, and when they get out to see what it is, they find the seemingly dead body of a hairy Bigfoot-type monster (Kevin Peter Hall). Believing that the creature is a grizzly bear, the Hendersons take it home, planning to stuff the beast and put it on display in their living room. Predictably, the hirsute monster revives and is adopted by the family as a pet. Originally conceived as a TV series by comedian Brad Garrett, Harry and the Hendersons ultimately did make it to the small screen as a weekly syndicated sitcom in 1990, with Kevin Peter Hall repeating the title role during the series' first 24 episodes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- John Lithgow, Melinda Dillon, (more)
- 1986
This drama is set within the international corporate world and centers on a highly principled executive for an international drug-manufacturer who just prior to his retirement decides to blow the whistle on his dishonest colleagues who have involved themselves in the illegal South American drug trade. His company retaliates and in the end manages to destroy the executive's personal and professional life. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1985
Daniel J. Travanti plays a glum, no-nonsense Edward R. Murrow in this made-for-TV biopic. We follow Murrow's rise to prominence as America's foremost news commentator between the years 1940 through 1955, beginning with his on-the-spot radio coverage of the bombing of London. After the war, Murrow hosts CBS television's documentary series See It Now, which eventually leads to his legendary confrontation with Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Murrow's own occasional compromises with his conscience, and his extramarital affairs, are bypassed in Ernest Kinoy's lean, spare script. Of more importance in the scheme of things is Murrow's edict that TV "can teach, can illuminate, and damn it, can inspire." Also in the cast are Dabney Coleman as CBS head-honcho William Paley, John McMartin as Frank Stanton, Edward Herrmann as Fred Friendly, David Suchet as William L. Shirer, and Robert Vaughn as President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Murrow debuted January 19, 1986, as an HBO Premiere Films presentation ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
John Schlesinger directed this fact-based drama - adapted from Robert Lindsay's bestseller of the same title -- about two Californians, friends since boyhood, who are caught selling government secrets to the Soviet Union. Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) is an all-American boy, studying for the priesthood in a seminary. But Boyce decides to drop out of school, and with the help of his father (Pat Hingle), a FBI agent, he gets a job working for the CIA in a message-routing center. While reading the messages, Boyce is shocked to learn that the CIA is involved in fixing Australian elections. Watching the Watergate hearings on television, he feels an ever-mounting sense of outrage at the arrogance of the U.S. government and decides to do something about it. Deciding to supply the CIA messages to the Russians, he enlists his childhood friend Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) to help him. Lee is to deliver the CIA secrets to a Russian operative (David Suchet) at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. But Lee is an unreliable drug dealer, and his sloppy spy trail leads the two old friends into more trouble than they bargained for. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, (more)
A seat-of-the-pants militia attitude gets a boost from this conventional drama about the heroics of a teen son anxious to free his father from captivity in a small Middle Eastern nation. Doug's (Jason Gedrick) father is an Air Force pilot who was shot down on a mission near the border of an Arab country and is now held hostage. Failing adequate U.S. intervention causes a desperate Doug to enlist his school chums in a wild plan to essentially sneak away with two Air Force jets and take off on a mission to rescue his father. He convinces the veteran Chappy (Louis Gossett, Jr.) into flying one plane, while Doug himself flies another (he learned how to pilot from his father). Yes. If audiences believe all this, then the ending should come as no surprise either. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Louis Gossett, Jr., Jason Gedrick, (more)
- 1985
In this made-for-TV thriller, a sportscaster engineers a daring escape from a Soviet prison camp after being snared by a KGB scheme. Mickey Almon (David Keith), a sports star-turned-journalist, arrives in Moscow to cover an international tournament. Soon, though, he's tempted to play the hero once again, this time not as an athlete, but as a smuggler of repressed scientific research. Against the advice of his wife (Nancy Paul), Mickey agrees to help the Russians who've approached him, but the entire intrigue turns out to be a set-up. Physically neglected and emotionally tortured in a stinking hole for several weeks, Mickey agrees to sign a confession after being told that it will guarantee his release. Instead, he receives a ten-year sentence and soon finds himself on a train bound for Siberia. Sewing rough-hewn gloves with the other foreign prisoners and living for the day each month when his care package arrives, Mickey soon resolves to escape or die trying. To that end, he enlists a cynical British spy (Malcolm McDowell) and a group of Soviet prisoners in a plan to escape via a supply train that can get them within reach of the West -- if only they can find a way to get onto it undetected. Gulag was directed by Roger Young, who previously helmed such lauded TV movies as Bitter Harvest and would go on to direct the original televised version of Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- David Keith, Malcolm McDowell, (more)
- 1985
The story in this two-part TV biopic was probably "untold" mainly because it was untrue. According to the revisionist script by Stirling Silliphant, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (overplayed by George C. Scott) may have been a fascist, a tyrant, a mass murderer and an intimate of Adolf Hitler, but he also had his warm and fuzzy side. This was manifested in his genuine love for his gorgeous mistress Clara Petacci (Virginia Madsen), whose devotion to Il Duce was equally strong, so much so that she willingly went to her death along with him when the Axis collapsed and the ex-dictator was summarily shot. Despite his extramarital shenanigans, Mussolini had plenty of affection left over for his long-suffering wife Rachel (Lee Grant) and his children. With a cast comprised largely of non-Italians (notably the aggressively Irish Gabriel Byrne as Mussolini's son Vittorio), this epic had more phony dialects than a Marx Bros. picture. Despite its distant relation to the facts and its flaccid treatment of one of history's darkest periods, Mussolini: The Untold Story (filmed not in Italy but in Yugoslavia) garnered respectable ratings when it was originally telecast by NBC on November 24 and 26, 1985--and also earned a brace of Emmy award nominations. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- George C. Scott, Lee Grant, (more)
- 1985
Agatha Christie's famous Belgian fussbudget detective Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) is called in after a beautiful American actress (Faye Dunaway) claims that her husband, a prominent British lord, was murdered by a woman who looks just like her. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Peter Ustinov, Faye Dunaway, (more)
- 1985
This informative and disturbing docudrama is about the legal persecution of a whistle-blower, a VIP in a drug consortium with corporate offices in Basle, Switzerland. This executive went to the European Common Market (now the EU) with evidence of his company's malpractice. As a result, he was put in prison for industrial espionage for three months, his wife committed suicide during that time, and he was not allowed to go to her funeral. When he got out of prison on bail only because he managed to get to an outside lawyer, he discovered his small farm holdings in Italy were confiscated (Italy is a member of the Basle drug consortium). At the time of the filming of this documentary, the executive's legal fate was as yet undecided, but the film's implications that a drug company can be powerful enough to silence its accusers is a chilling indictment. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- David Suchet, Maria Schneider, (more)
- 1984
- R
Based on John Le Carré's novel by the same name, this story about Charlie (Diane Keaton) a female double agent working between the Palestinians and Israelis, loses some of the excitement and in-depth characterization engendered by the long novel -- mainly because the novel is hard to capture in a two-hour filmed format. But the action itself carries viewers along as Charlie ends up leaving England and her job as an actress in a Brit repertory company to meet Kurtz (Klaus Kinski) in Greece who recruits her as a spy. Charlie later has to handle her own emotions when she gets romantically involved with her Israeli contact (Yorgo Voyagis), though events move her quickly along to a Palestinian military camp near Beirut. Once she has passed herself off as a reliable Palestinian agent and completed her military training at the camp, she goes to Germany to hunt down a Palestinian terrorist (Sami Frey). Filled with a multitude of characters and locations, not to mention camera shots, the intensity of this story is dissipated somewhat by literally and figuratively covering a lot of territory, though the thread of the story itself is never lost. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Diane Keaton, Yorgo Voyagis, (more)
- 1984
A critic impacts the life of a talented man in this drama. ~ All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- David Suchet, Frances Tomelty, (more)
- 1984
- PG
- Add Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes to QueueAdd Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes to top of Queue
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes is a reverent retelling of the Edgar Rice Burroughs original, with a 1980s-sensibilities slant. Shipwrecked on the coast of Africa, Lord Jack Clayton (Paul Geoffrey) and his pregnant wife Lady Alice (Cheryl Campbell) attempt to survive in the hostile environment, but both die shortly after the birth of their son John. Abandoned in the wilderness, the orphaned John is adopted by a family of rather highly evolved apes, and raised as one of their own. Years later, John-now known as Tarzan, and now played by Christopher Lambert-comes across a party of white hunters. Rescuing one of the intruders, Belgian Captain Phillipe D'Arnot (Ian Holm) from a horrible death , Tarzan is taught to speak English by the grateful D'Arnot. Coming across the remains and possessions of Tarzan's parents, D'Arnot discovers that the Lord of the Jungle is actually the Earl of Greystoke. Brought back to England, Tarzan is introduced to society, where his crude, apelike manners offend everyone--except the likeable (and painfully senile) 6th Lord of Greystoke (Ralph Richardson, in his final film role) and Greystoke's American ward, Jane Porter (Andie McDowell, whose Southern-fried voice is dubbed by Glenn Close). Disturbed at the notion of Tarzan's inheriting Greystoke manner, his more greedy relatives begin plotting against him. But it is Tarzan himself who decides that he cannot adapt himself to England-especially after a painful reunion with his ape foster father, imprisoned in a science-lab cage. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm, (more)
Another of the many Sidney Sheldon novels given the TV-miniseries treatment in the 1970s and '80s, Master of the Game yielded a three-part, nine-hour extravaganza, with enough corporate and romantic intrigue to fill an entire television season. Covering nearly 100 years, the story (which remained astonishingly faithful to the book) begins in the late 19th century, when ruthless young Scottish entrepreneur Jamie McGregor (Ian Charleson) emigrates to South Africa, in hopes of accumulating enough wealth and power to get even with his longtime enemy, Dutch merchant Van der Merwe (Donald Pleasence). Thanks to an extremely prolific diamond mine, the money comes quickly -- as does vengeance, when McGregor deflowers Van der Merwe's convent-educated daughter, Margaret (Cherie Lunghi). The result of this indiscretion is a daughter named Kate (Dyan Cannon), who turns out to be the "Master" of the title. Upon attaining adulthood, Kate assumes control of her father's vast financial empire, ruling her inherited international conglomerate, and her husband, David Blackwell (David Birney), with an iron fist. The story continues into the next several generations, with Kate's lily-livered son, Tony (Harry Hamlin), giving birth to twin daughters, Eve and Alexandra (both played by Liane Langland). One is good, the other evil; the evil twin threatens threaten to destroy everything that Kate has so painstakingly built up. Eventually, they both become the victims of a sneering, malevolent gigolo (Fernando Allende) with a penchant for beating young women senseless. Told in flashback, the narrative comes to a head during Kate's 90th birthday celebration, an event tainted by the efforts of a mysterious killer to wipe the domineering matriarch and her family from the face of the earth. Largely filmed on location, Master of the Game was telecast by CBS from February 19 to 22, 1984. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Dyan Cannon, Harry Hamlin, (more)
