Donald Sutherland's '80s Agatha Christie Adaptation Is Impossible To Stream

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Whodunnit films are all the rage again thanks to Rian Johnson's "Knives Out" movies and Kenneth Branagh's Agatha Christie adaptations, with the latter in particular spurring on new interest in the 66 mystery novels and 14 short story collections written by the creator of sleuths Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. For new fans of Christie, there's no shortage of movies based on her work, and most of them are star-studded affairs that keep you riveted throughout.

Given Christie's popularity at the moment, you'd figure that every single film adaptation, aside from a few early talkies that are considered lost media, would be available to stream somewhere online. Even Peter Collinson's 1974 "And Then There Were None" starring Richard Attenborough and Oliver Reed, which has been hard to track down over the years, is currently available at Kanopy. And yet, there's one high-profile Christie movie that's completely out of the streaming rotation right now.

Cannon Films honchos Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus likely had high hopes for Desmond Davis' "Ordeal by Innocence" over 40 years ago when they brought together the starry likes of Donald Sutherland, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Plummer, Ian McShane, and Sarah Miles to headline the 1984 feature. Though the novel isn't one of Christie's best known works (partially because it doesn't feature Poirot or Marple), many hardcore fans of the author consider it an underrated gem (while Christie sometimes cited it as her personal favorite). Unfortunately, the film had to travel a rocky path on the way to its release, which might be why it's kinda disappeared.

Set in the 1950s, "Ordeal by Innocence" stars Sutherland as Dr. Arthur Calgary, a paleontologist who's just returned to the UK from a two-year study of continental drift in Antarctica. Before he left, he gave a ride to a young man, who left his address book in his car. When Calgary goes to the boy's family home with the book, he's shocked to learn from his father (Plummer) that the youngster was hanged for having bludgeoned his adoptive mother (Dunaway) to death with a fireplace poker. Calgary immediately knows this can't be true because the boy was with him at the time of the murder. So, the paleontologist decides to investigate the matter on his own.

Davis does a competent job directing, and the performances are all first-rate, but when the movie tested poorly, its producers made the disastrous decision to replace composer Pino Donaggio's orchestral score with a jarringly jazzy soundtrack from Dave Brubeck. Though the Los Angeles Times' Kevin Thomas gave the film a good review when it was dumped into theaters in 1985, it was quickly shunted to VHS and cable, at which point it was completely forgotten.

"Ordeal by Innocence" did receive a limited Blu-ray release from Kino Lorber in 2019, so there's a decent digital print of it, should someone want to license it to a streaming service. If they could also find Donaggio's original score (which is probably more in the vein of his work for the great Brian De Palma), this misfire might be worth revisiting. For now, however, you'll have to go off the beaten path to watch this particular Christie flick.