A touch of the sun: “Death on the Nile” (1978)

By Scott Ross

This follow-up to Murder on the Orient Express by its producers doesn’t have the stylized elegance Sidney Lumet brought to its predecessor, nor quite so impressive a cast. It’s also a bit overlong — the Agatha Christie novel on which it was based is lengthy too, and several of her suspects had to be jettisoned before filming. But the picture has considerable compensations, starting with Peter Ustinov’s expansive, gourmand Hercule Poirot, a much kindlier figure than Albert Finney’s. Making Ustinov the star of your movie was excellent inducement to get me to a theater in those days, and buttressing him with David Niven, Maggie Smith and Angela Lansbury was Pavlovian enough a gesture to make me salivate. That was the summer I finally figured out I was gay after years of wondering, but I sometimes think my long-standing passion for Smith and Lansbury should have clued me in sooner… which of course only means that I am once again stereotyping myself.*

The recurring spectacle of Smith and a superannuated Bette Davis bitching each other is good, nasty fun (the script was by Anthony Shaffer) but her character is more than just a figure of amusement; as a woman in reduced circumstances, and rightly bitter about it, the actress gets more feeling into her cardboard character than you might expect, and her cigars and masculine attire are intriguing. Is “Bowers” meant to be a Lesbian? Perhaps. How, then, to account for her line, “It’s been my experience that men are least attracted to women who treat them well”? Spoken with genuine regret, this suggests that Bowers has been hurt, by a man, and perhaps more than one. Lansbury, however, is a figure of camp here, and to be savored as such. Deliberately outré, her performance outwardly scaled to the character of the bibulous, erotically obsessed Salome Otterbourne, a rather obvious parody of Elinor Glyn,† the wide-eyed Lansbury slides across floors and lurches through her scenes like an outrageous drunkard, even when Otterbourne is more or less sober. When in a speculative flashback she is seen searching with her hand beneath a salon divan for a discarded gun, she flops onto the seat as though she’s so sloshed she can barely stand up. It’s a witty gesture, perfectly in character.

Ustinov was a marvelous chameleon, equally at home as the philosophical slave merchant Batiatus in Spartacus, the Cockney computer genius of Hot Millions, providing the voice of the craven animated Prince John in the Disney Robin Hood, or conjuring a voluble Blackbeard’s Ghost. His Poirot is warmer than Finney’s,‡ but is just as comically fussy, and even more attracted to foodstuff; when he discovers that a shooting victim has no appetite for luncheon, he leaps at the plate with barely disguised rapaciousness. David Niven makes a splendid second-in-command for him, a delicious reversal of the war years when Niven was a Major and the young Ustinov his batman. Niven’s all too typically British aversion to, and confusion about, Poirot’s frequent bursts of French remind one of what a genial comedian Niven was, and how dearly his sort of light touch is missed in the cruder, crasser world we enjoy today. Tangoing with the inebriated Lansbury while maintaining a look of (to mix my languages) ultra-dignified British sang-roid is a vest-pocket lesson in stylized hilarity.

If the rest of the company is not as stellar as those four, or indeed as the celestial grouping in Murder on the Orient Express, it’s difficult to kick at a cast that includes Jack Warden, Olivia Hussey, Jon Finch, Harry Andrews, Sam Wannamaker, George Kennedy, Simon McCorkindale and Jane Birkin, even if it also features Mia Farrow and Lois Chiles. Playing a romantic obsessive here, Farrow may have been more revealing of herself than she intended. In any case, watching this serial collector and coacher of children today as she stalks her former lover in this picture it’s difficult not to sense an uncomfortable melding of actress and character. As for Chiles… seldom, even in our surface-oriented society, has so gorgeous an exterior been stretched over an emptier shell. In role after role this quintessential non-actor left viewers dismayed at her rampant inability to give a performance that wouldn’t have shamed the dullest would-be thespian in your senior class, and equally flummoxed that she kept getting parts in otherwise good, interesting or at least successful pictures. (The Great Gatsby, The Way We Were, Moonraker, Sweet Liberty, Broadcast News, Say Anything.)

Finch cuts a fine figure, looking far younger than he had any right to as an unreconstructed 1930s Socialist, the one character on the boat who has absolutely no reason, and presumably no means, for being there. (One senses the strong whiff of a red herring.) When he falls in with the equally pulchritudinous Olivia Hussey, your mind may drift to speculation on how stunning their children will be. And if Davis trots out the steely bitch routine she virtually had a patent on, presumably modeled from life, Jack Warden as a shady Swiss psychiatrist more than counterbalances her; Warden was one of those actors, like Eli Wallach, who raised the tenor of every scene he was in just by showing up. Simon MacCorkindale does well by his role as Farrow’s beloved and Chiles’ husband, and I.S. Johar is so marvelously funny as the paddle steamer Karnak‘s sunny yet eminently perturbable confrère it’s easy to forget that he was Gassim, the man Peter O’Toole brings out of the burning desert in Lawrence of Arabia, and is later forced to shoot, although his presence does make one wonder what an Indian is doing managing a boat in Egypt. (A similar question attends Saeed Jaffrey in his brief role as steward who discovers a murdered ladies’ maid, as well as the viewer’s musing on just why the hell an actor of Jaffrey’s stature is playing a walk-on.)

The picture has a lush, open feel; it was so beautifully lit by Jack Cardiff and so well directed by John Guillermin you don’t notice how little actual location shooting there was once the action settles on the boat; many of the scenes were shot on a mock-up of the paddle steamer at Pinewood. Anthony Powell’s costumes are rich (and, as with those for Lansbury and Smith, witty) and the whole thing is wrapped in a sensual, misterioso score by Nino Rota. For all that it isn’t a patch on its predecessor it’s just right for an evening’s relaxed entertainment, as it was for an afternoon’s when I was 17.

I started to write, “Watch this one now, before Ken Branagh directs a showy, camera-mad remake of it,” but to my horror I see it’s too late.

As the manager of the Karnak would say: Oh, cripes.

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*In his amusing 1985 book The Gay Cliché: Or How to Be a Homosexual Guy and Still Maintain Some Slight Degree of Individuality, Tony Lang suggests it best you not know who Lansbury is.

†E.M. Forster made Glyn a figure of fun too, but he didn’t ridicule her to this extent.

‡Finney was asked to reprise his Poirot but the actor was loath to undergo that four-hour makeup job again, especially under an Egyptian sun. Who could blame him?