While on the journey, Poirot meets a very close friend Bouc, who works for the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits.

The train is stopped when a landslide blocks the line on the second night out from Istanbul, and American millionaire Samuel Edward Ratchett is found stabbed to death the next morning.

A key to the solution is Ratchett's revealed involvement in the Armstrong tragedy in the United States several years earlier, in which a baby was kidnapped and then murdered.

Burt Reynolds, Judi Dench, Lauren Bacall, Claire Bloom, Charlotte Rampling, and Sophia Loren were all originally believed to have been cast in the film.

[2][3] A replica of an Orient Express buffet car was built at Horsforth's newly opened Transformer Studios, where the majority of the filming took place.