Death On The Nile

She was only able to pick up a single loose slot this time around, but Najwa still managed to throw me off by skipping the threatened Bollywood musical or Marvel Comics Universe entry by going with, instead, the 1978 John Guillermin adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic Death On The Nile.

Imagine a pleasure cruise up the Nile on a comfortable steam-powered paddleboat, but that the cruise is interrupted by a murder, and everybody on the boat has a motive.  No, seriously, that’s not just a mental exercise, that’s the plot of the film.  And while I had read the novel a few years before (I hadn’t ever seen an adaptation) I frankly had forgotten just who did it.  I mean, when everyone’s a suspect, it gets kind of tough to keep things straight, especially when you (humblebrag) read so many books as I do, I mean, seriously…No, I’m just saying that unless the solution really comes out of left field, like, say, Murder On The Orient Express (and if you’ve seen or read that you damned well better NOT forget who did it!) it’s a little much to ask to recall the whole thing.  I mean, newlywed heiress murdered…it was Colonel Mustard with the pea-shooter on the paddleboat in the river?  Two out of three ain’t bad, right, Meatloaf?  And to my credit, as the film rolled forward, I eventually remembered who did it before the reveal.  So I’m calling that at least a draw.

And just so’s I don’t forget whodunnit again, here’s the skinny:

The Carousel is a LIE!

The newlyweds in question here are Simon Doyle (played by Simon MacCorkindale, aka Discount Michael York…no, seriously, I spent the whole movie thinking it was Michael York, it’s uncanny) and the rich and tasteful sideboobalicious Linnet Ridgeway, and all possible happiness all the world wishes both of them (he says, in a Brandt voice).

There are rumors going around that the whole scorned ex-lover thing might not be an acting job…

Well…I mean, all the world except for Jacqueline De Bellefort.  You see, Jacqueline and Mr. Doyle were a couple, until Jackie, hoping to procure an estate-management job for her indigent lover introduced Simon to her friend the heiress.  And before you know it, the wrong two people have gotten married and are off on honeymoon in Egypt, because let’s face it, Egypt was all the rage in 1937…I mean it’s a full five years before things are going to really go to pot and Rommel and Auchinleck are to duel it out at El Alamein, and who can see that coming?  (OK, OK, so like everybody not named Neville Chamberlain but that’s really kind of beside the point.)

Not a cloud in the sky/Got the sun in my eyes/And I won’t be surprised if it’s a dream

And you’d think it would turn out to be quite the pleasant honeymoon, but as it is, everywhere the young couple goes, it seems the scorned lover manages to follow – even to the top of one of the Great Pyramids (I think they’re literally on top of the pyramid of Menkaure, but I’m trying to figure this out via Wiki, so who knows?).  There Jackie is, tormenting them the whole way.

Hercule Poirot cannot keep his nose out of everybody else’s business.  The Sphinx cannot keep his nose.  Fair’s fair.

And there, too, is famous busybody Hercule Poirot, snooping in on murders that haven’t even happened yet.  Or perhaps he was just sketching.  Yes, I’m sure that’s it, he was just sketching.

Let’s be honest – I’d watch a remake of Tetsuo: The Iron Man if it starred David Niven and Peter Ustinov

Well, the nearly-handlebarred Poirot (Belgian, not French, as becomes the running joke…this must be Tuesday) as Lou Costello runs into his Bud Abbott in Colonel Race at a fancy hotel in Cairo.  Or maybe Alexandria.  Pish-posh!  As if I care!  (Oh bother, I’m pretty sure it’s Alexandria!)  But the Colonel is not the only character we shall meet there.  In fact, the young newlyweds, and the scorned ex-lover make an appearance, as do a host of other characters who will coincidentally be on the same boat a few scenes later.  Let’s be fair, there probably isn’t all that much to do in 1937 CairoAlexandria if you’re on vacation but get on a paddle steamer.  At any rate, following Jackie making yet another scene, Linnet asks the estimable Poirot if he would talk to her.  Poirot, who is literally just days removed from solving a murder on a train bound for the Orient, tries to talk Jackie out of her madness.  “For God’s sake, woman,” he exclaims, “I’ve just solved a murder on a train and I have no intention of solving a murder on a paddle steamer!  I’m on vacation!”  But Jackie, it seems, is not dissuaded from her intentions of revenge.

“Denial.”  That’s it, just “denial”.  … <schwwwwip!>  “What is not just a river in Egypt?”

Well, Doyle has an ingenious plan up his sleeve, and knowing that Jackie will be stalking him and his new bride, he fakes getting a cab (and by cab, I mean a carriage pulled by a horse, of course) to the Alexandria train station, only to double back and hop on board the (amazing) Karnak, our handsome paddle steamer, and our now-free newlyweds are headed south up the Nile!  There’s no way Jackie can catch them now!

Ramesses II always loses at musical chairs!

Well, I mean, except she kind of shows up when they make a stop at the temple of Abu Simbel, and she subsequently catches a ride on the boat.  Oh, and on the same stop, a large stone mysteriously falls from the top of some ruins, nearly obliterating Linnet and Doyle.  Just the ravages of gravity, I’m certain.

Look, let’s cut to the chase.  There’s going to be a murder.  It’s going to happen on the boat.  And it’s going to happen about like this:  In a parlor, with a single witness present, Jackie and Doyle get into an argument, and Jackie pulls a pea-shooter and shoots Doyle in the leg.  She, in horror at what she has done to the man she loves, goes hysterical and is taken off and heavily sedated, while Doyle is removed to another cabin and medically attended to.  But the pea-shooter, it turns out, goes missing, and in the night, it is used to murder the sleeping Linnet.  Somebody on the boat did it – but who was it?  That, as you might expect, is Poirot’s (“I wasn’t even supposed to BE here today!”) job to determine.  Oddly enough, it appears that everybody on the boat has a motive.

Oh, for the days when writing a manifesto was a noble pursuit!

For instance, we’ve got a random Marxist on board.  They’re well known for killing some tens if not hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century, and maybe he’s trying to catch up to the gulags.  And, to be fair, he openly touts the anti-fascist mantra that anybody who has significantly more wealth than he does should be killed on sheer principle, so he certainly has a motive to kill Linnet.  Well, strike one.  Our friend the Marxist is totally innocent…at least until there’s a revolution in some third-world country.  I’ll bet he was there propping up Che Guevara or Pol Pot, then, wasn’t he?

I change my vote to “not guilty”!

And then there’s the doctor.  This particular doctor is a bit of a quack, and his radical treatments have caused irreparable psychic damage to a friend of Linnet’s.  She, in turn, has threatened to expose him for the charlatan that he is, and while he believes that he is in the right, his Institute simply cannot survive the litigation it would require to raise a libel lawsuit against her, so he would prefer her silenced.  Still, following his Hippocratic Oath he may first do no harm, and he is not the murderer.

Kim Carnes’ Worst Nightmare

And then we’ve got some old biddy (played by Bette Davis of course – and you might just think that at her age she could have a role in an Agatha Christie adaptation and retire, but no, not two years later she finds herself in an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation of The Watcher In The Woods.  H.P. Lovecraft!) whose motive to murder the young heiress is that she covets her expensive pearl necklace (not the ZZ Top type).  Well, she does steal the pearl necklace from the cold and dead corpse, but it’s unrelated to the murder per se, so she’s pretty much off the hook.  She even gives the pearls back!  She’s practically Chidi Anagonye!

Maggie Magtoria

Then we’ve got Bette Davis’s maidservant, played by my sister.  (Oh wait, my bad, that’s full-price Maggie Smith!) This maidservant has been reduced to her sad state of affairs as a result of some sort of bad business dealings by Linnet’s deceased father (she’s an heiress, of course her father is dead, that’s no spoiler!) so Maggie too has reason to murder the dead woman.  Narrator: She didn’t.

No man can eat fifty eggs!  Actually, have you seen my waistline?  I take that back.

And of course there’s “Uncle Andrew”, the unscrupulous American lawyer (standing in opposition to the quite-altogether-scrupulous British lawyers represented by none other than Colonel Race – it’s a bit weird, frankly) who stands to evidently lose money on the account of Linnet marrying and as a result having a trust get transferred or who the hell knows what.  Her marriage hurts this lawyer financially, and let’s pretend there’s a real reason.  So he wants her dead, and soon, so he doesn’t lose his bottom line, right?  Well, kind of.  I mean, really he wants her to sign a tricksy legal document without reading it which would preserve his financial stake, but barring that he wants her dead.  In fact, Poirot eventually determines (and it’s not at all clear how) that it was Uncle Andrew who dislodged the large stone at Abu Simbel, unsuccessfully not killing his client.  That’s a double negative.  Unsuccessfully killing his client.  No, that sounds wrong.  Failing to kill his client.  Yes.  Why he went with that before trying to get her to sign the document, well, I’ll never know because Poirot, that miserable bastard, didn’t tell me.  But, despite his efforts, Uncle Andrew is also not the killer.

Sweet novelist, the novelist’s daughter, standing by the sea green water…is something staining the mountain tops?

Then, we’ve got the Novelist’s Daughter.  She happens to be the witness to the first shooting (that is, when Jackie shoots Doyle in the leg), so when Jackie drops the gun she has full opportunity to have picked it up.  Not only that, but she has a motive – her mother (the novelist, if I haven’t given that bit away already) is being sued for libel by none other than Linnet Ridgeway due to some salacious scenes in a book that apparently are, well, libelious towards said heiress.  Her mother is ruined, she knows where the gun was…nope, she didn’t do it.  She does, however, hook up with the Marxist, so there is that.

Her hair is Harlow gold/Her lips are sweet as guns/Her hands are never cold/She got Princess Leia Buns

And, of course, we’ve got Linnet’s femme de chambre, as she is appropriately called, as she is evidently French.  This young woman has been hoping to run off with an Egyptian man (ever since they were back in England, so the whole Nile trip seems a bit conspicuously serendipitous) but Linnet has opposed the entire idea seeing as the man is already married.  I mean, if you think this is a scandal now, put yourself into 1937 England and reboot.  Linnet is having none of it, and won’t release the  femme de chambre from service.  And without money or letters of reference, what can a poor girl do but murder her mistress?  Well, she didn’t murder her mistress.  But she did happen to see who did it, and she tried some blackmail, and she got murdered in turn for her trouble.  Verdict: innocent.  Innocent of murder, anyway.

Murder, She Rote

Which leads us to the next-best candidate, the novelist.  She’s a lush and a half, and we’ve already enumerated her motive for murdering Linnet when talking about her daughter.  For these two, at least, the motive would be the same.  But, like the femme de chambre, she is not guilty, oh no, in fact she too has witnessed something too horrible to write, oh yes, she has seen who killed the femme de chambre herself.  (It’s a small boat, do you really think folks won’t notice things?) And she is in the very process of detailing the murder to Poirot when out of the blue – bang! – she is shot in the forehead with Uncle Andrew’s gun. Don’t worry, Uncle Andrew didn’t do this one, either, and burial at sea (at river?) is generally considered honorable.

O, proud death/What feast is toward in thine eternal cell/That thou so many princes at a shot/So bloodily hast struck?

Of course, this leaves us in a fairly untenable situation – we’ve accounted for everybody on the boat, and nobody did it!  (OK, there are crewmembers on the boat, but come on, at least these folks didn’t actually have a motive.)  Thankfully, Poirot takes a cue from the movie Clue (also see: The Thin Man; also see: Every Mystery Story Ever) and assembles all of the suspects to lead them through how he has solved the murder.  Now, to be fair, I’ve previewed the results above – Poirot didn’t actually clear anybody who hadn’t already turned up dead (that’s three at this point) before this convocation.

But the point is, nobody on the boat could have possibly done it…except for Doyle.  After being “shot in the leg” he was left alone for a few minutes as the immediate responders tended to the hysterical Jackie…and to steal a line from Tony Shaloub, here’s what happened:

The Doyle-Linnet romance was a setup from the start.  The actual lovers Doyle and Jackie planned it as a way to inherit (effectively steal) Linnet’s fortune.  Doyle marries Linnet, Linnet is murdered, Doyle inherits the fortune, and after a while he hooks back up with his old girlfriend.  That’s the plan, in general terms.

In specific, it goes like this.  We’ve got the whole honeymoon stalking thing (all planned) leading up to the confrontation on the boat.  The “hysterical” Jackie “shoots” (but surreptitiously misses) Doyle, and he uses red nail polish on a handkerchief to pretend he is hit in the leg.  The witnesses rush the hysterical Jackie off and sedate her while keeping a watch on her all night, keeping suspicion off of her.  In the brief meantime Doyle gathers up the now-dropped gun, quickly runs off to murder his wife with it, returns to the lounge where he was “shot” and (replacing a bullet in the gun to keep the count correct in case the weapon is ultimately found – which it is – and muffling the sound with a shawl) actually shoots himself in the leg before wrapping the gun in the shawl and throwing it overboard.

It’s a seemingly good plan, but Doyle is seen by the femme de chambre, whose blackmail results in her getting her throat slit by Jackie.  This action, in turn, is seen by the novelist, who, while making a big production about knowing who did it, again gets shot by Jackie.  And Poirot, well, he figures this all out, because he’s French.  Erm, Belgian.  And when he exposes the true plot, Jackie finds the chance to shoot Doyle, and then herself.  Five bodies on one boat.  That’s more than half of the Hamlet body count.  The End.

Yes, it’s a great cast (like, damn, one of the better casts I’ve ever seen assembled, you know, considering the fact they had to get Discount Michael York) and so on.  They shot on location, in fact it certainly looks like they are literally on top of one of the Great Pyramids of Giza, in the days before CGI could fake that kind of stuff.  But if you think about it, the plot is a bit ludicrous.  The whole thing turns on trying to misdirect suspicion away from the obvious parties (Jackie and Doyle) and onto somebody else.  And somehow, Jackie and Doyle managed to book a Nile Tour Boat with not one, not two, not three, not four, but no less than EIGHT other passengers who randomly came together yet had a motive to kill Linnet.  I mean, a single one is a stroke of luck and two is nothing less than a miracle, but EIGHT?  This is the stuff of fairy tales.  And on top of that, who else is on the boat but the incredibly famous Hercule Poirot, the detective who never lets a murder suspect get away?  It would be folly, absolute folly to try to pull such a fast one on Poirot, but instead of biding their time and trying the murder again at a more propitious moment, instead we’ve got two lovers who try to carry out a murder with so many moving parts it would make Rube Goldberg blush.  And yet, they would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!  Yes, Agatha, it’s a clever plot, but real humans?  They would have tried something simpler.