After the success of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974), starring Albert Finney as detective Hercule Poirot, producers John Brabourne and Richard Godwin moved on to a follow-up. This time Peter Ustinov plays the fussy Belgian sleuth who puts his "little gray cells" to work when an heiress (Lois Chiles) is murdered on a small passenger ship while on her honeymoon.
Where Orient Express featured a proverbial all-star cast, Death downsizes to a somewhat less stellar line-up of fading stars, rising talents, and reliable character actors playing a gallery of arrogant, greedy, and resentful suspects.
Top of the list is Mia Farrow, who lost her fiancé (Simon MacCorkindale) to her (former) friend Chiles, but Poirot discovers that everyone on board has some motivation for murder: the questionable German doctor (Jack Warden), the embezzling American lawyer (George Kennedy), the long-suffering personal maid (Jane Birkin), the rich American widow (Bette Davis), and the flamboyant romance novelist (Angela Lansbury).
Davis plays the role in bitchy diva mode and Lansbury, who went on to play Christie's Miss Marple and star in Murder, She Wrote on TV, is all theatrical flamboyance as the high-living author.
It's a fun if somewhat slow-moving murder mystery that favors glamour and drawing-room banter over suspense, like a lavish version of a British TV mystery set in the 1930s. Anthony Shaffer, the Tony award-winning playwright of Sleuth and screenwriter of Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, adapts Agatha Christie's novel and provides the witty repartee and cutting remarks.
And while it plays out largely within the lavish confines of a passenger ship on the Nile, visits to the pyramids and the Sphinx give the film a handsome visual scope and spectacle, and the costume design won both the Academy Award and the BAFTA. John Guillerman (The Towering Inferno) directs and David Niven, Olivia Hussey, Jon Finch, and Maggie Smith costar.
Fans of Agatha Christie and British TV mysteries should appreciate the film and the timing is opportune, given the upcoming remake from director/star Kenneth Branagh (a follow-up to his successful version of Murder on the Orient Express).
Kino Lorber presents a new 2K restoration featuring audio commentary by film historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson, the 1978 made-for-TV promotional featurette "The Making of Death on the Nile," and archival interviews with stars Peter Ustinov and Jane Birkin.