Death on the Nile

"The Nile, forever new and old,
Among the living and the dead,
Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfe

Death on the Nile features an opening in the English countryside as if this were Downton Abbey (the film even features Maggie Smith), but soon we are introduced to a treasure trove of spoiled opulent British people all aboard a cruise in Egypt, where the rest of this murder-mystery tale will take place.

Film reviews are supposed to limit the use of personal anecdotes, yet I must write that this is one of the earliest films I have a memory of watching, and this reminiscence is what drew me to seek out the movie and watch it as an adult. I first viewed it when I was a young child with my grandmother. (She probably liked it more than I did then or do now.) I can only remember two scenes, and they both feature Angela Lansburgy, who appears here as a novelist with a ripe fondness for full-bodied vocabulary. She gets most of the notes right initially but soon goes over the top, hyperbolically flailing about and complaining that her drink has "lost its croc." It might be oddly ironic that the worst performance of the woman who would go on to be Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote is in this murder-mystery film.

Aside from her, though, Bette Davis and Smith are especially enjoyable to watch. Davis joyfully orders around Smith, who despises what she has to put up with. Mia Farrow's portrayal of a sinister and nefarious woman out for revenge is almost as good as her performance in Rosemary's Baby. Jack Warden sort of has a German accent as a quack who brags about using Armadillo urine as a remedy. Many actors have played Agatha Christie's famous detective, and this time it's Peter Ustinov. "Luck," he says, "I leave to the others." His portrayal is a good one, more subtle than the performance of the same character by Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express.

Everybody, as expected, has a motive for the murder that takes place on the cruise down the Nile, and yet they all, expectedly, deny it. "Everyone around here was her enemy," we are told. Poirot deals out a plethora of hypotheticals in the whodunit scenes, which only happen an hour into the film. From there, there's a variety of scenes featuring Poirot and his new partner, Colonel Race (David Niven), as they put together the pieces of the puzzle, and it's mostly good fun. But when he finally reveals what had happened ("We have pwoved it! Pwoved it!" he shouts), it feels like a disappointment.

As a matter of fact, unfortunately the whole movie feels dull compared to Murder on the Orient Express, another Agotha Critie novel adaptation released only several years before, and especially so compared to Clue, an Christie-esque whodunit that is more elementary but certainly more fun. Other than a rather tense scene involving a cobra, this movie has no croc.