Death on the Nile (1978)

I've done posts on two of the four movies in which Margaret Rutherford played Agatha Christie's sleuth Miss Marple, and believe I have the other two sitting on my DVR. A dozen or so years later, there was a vogue started with 1974's Murder on the Orient Express of making movies of especially the Hercule Poirot stories, with an all-star cast of suspects. One that I haven't done a post on before is Death on the Nile. So when it last showed up on TCM I recorded it to watch, write up this post, and save it to be posted at some later date either when it airs again or when I haven't posted on a mystery movie in a while.

As with the other all-star extravaganzas based on Christie works, we meet the characters much the same way the mastermind in a heist movie rounds up the people he needs to help him commit that heist. One is Jacqueline de Bellefort (Mia Farrow), who is engaged to be married to Simon Doyle (Simon MacCorkindale). Jackie has a friend, Linnet (Lois Chiles), who has an estate that needs looking after in the UK. She's got a lawyer, Pennington (George Kennedy), who is responsible for part of her affairs, but hires Simon to look after the actual estate. Unfortunately for Jackie, Linnet and Simon fall in love, get married, and go on honeymoon in Egypt, with Jackie basically stalking them and Penning trying to get Linnet to sign some papers that may or may not be in her interest to do so.

Eventually, to get away from Jackie, Linnet and Simon decide to go on a cruise up the Nile, which is where we meet the other characters. Peter Ustinov plays Poirot, so we know he's not the killer when someone actually gets bumped off. Colonel Race (David Niven) is a lawyer who suspects Pennington is up to no good. Salome Otterbourne (Angela Lansbury) is a trashy romance novelist who wrote a book that led Linnet to threaten a libel suit; Salome is traveling with her daughter Rosalie (Olivia Hussey). Louise (Jane Birkin) had worked for Linnet at the estate, and was expecting to get a bonus after the marriage that never materialized. And then there's Mrs. Van Schuyler, one of those Americans of the 1930s who seems to know everybody or at least claims to, and also has a yen for stealing jewels, of which Linnet has a bunch. Mrs. Van Schulyer is traveling with Bowers (Maggie Smith), a woman who thinks Linnet's father duped her family out of their wealth. So as you can see, a lot of people have reason not to like one another and be suspects when somebody finally gets murdered.

Now, the one person who is apparently not the suspect is Jackie. She gets drunk and shoots Simon in the leg one night, but some of the other passengers give her a sedative which knocks her out for the night. So the following morning, when Linnet is found quite dead, Jackie is the one person who seems like the most natural suspect but also has the best alibi for not having done it.

So, then, who did it? Obviously, I'm not going to tell, but Poirot starts putting his little gray cells to the test, interrogating each of the other passengers with a little help from Col. Race. Poirot also gets a cobra in his cabin for his trouble, although there's the question of who would have had access to a cobra making it seem more like a bit of a red herring. There's also at least one more murder, so we'll be able to get rid of another person as the suspect. For the climax, Poirot brings everybody together and correctly solves the case.

To be honest, I found the actual solving of the case more unrealistic than some other Agatha Christie movies I've seen, although not anywhere near Manhattan Murder Mystery which I watched not too far apart from Death on the Nile. Then again, with these all-star mysteries, part of the point is to watch the stars as much as the story. Everybody looks like they're having fun here, but I think there's a reason that Death on the Nile isn't as well-remembered as Murder on the Orient Express.