Teresa Reviews “Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb” (1993)

Teresa reviews “Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb” (1993) and finds it cursed with missed opportunities.

Fidelity to text: 3 Pharaoh’s curses
Miss Lemon shows up to demonstrate her interest in the occult. The timing of events gets seriously messed up and Rupert gets a personality transplant.

Quality of movie on its own: 2 1/2 Pharaoh’s curses
Slow, draggy, with far too many scenes of the props department’s expertise and a dig that looked like desert camping and not archeology. The score was good.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

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The short story starts when Hastings tells us that this was a thrilling and dramatic adventure. It may have been but the film wasn’t.

The sad part is how well it opened with newsreel footage discussing the discovery and opening of Men-Her-Ra’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The blend between vintage stock footage and new film was seamless. The announcer was perfect, capturing the “Wow! Look at this, folks!” enthusiasm of a 1930s announcer.

Then we get to the opening of the tomb. Lord Willard, archeologist and noted Egyptologist, discovers the seal locking the doors to the tomb has never been broken open. It’s 3,000 years old and priceless, like the contents of the tomb. So what does he do? He orders the irreplaceable seal smashed so he can reach the treasure quicker. Really? You expect me to believe that an archeologist, even on in 1935 when standards were laxer, would smash an artifact when he could spend an hour removing it? Or, he could, I don’t know, cut the ropes holding the seal to the door knobs.

Lord Willard deserved to die of a heart attack minutes later, after raiding the tomb like grave robbers looking for a big score. Oh wait. That’s what archeologists are, only they’ve got fancy degrees and their loot (usually) ends up in a museum open to the public as opposed to some private collection.

After that, the timing gets very wonky. The short story took place over two months or so. That gave people time to travel from place to place, send and receive cables across oceans, and for the murders to take place. In the story, Lord Willard dies. A few weeks later, Felix the financier dies of septicemia, followed shortly by his ne’er-do-well nephew, Rupert, by suicide.

During this time period, Lady Willard contacts Poirot. She’s afraid that there really is a curse upon the tomb and her son, a budding archeologist, will die at the digs. When Poirot and Hastings arrive at the dig, Professor Schneider has died of tetanus.

The film made it seem like it all happened in about one week, including the time Hastings spends in New York, interviewing Rupert and then discovering his body a day later when he learns about Felix’s death. There was no indication that time passed. This is where — since characters wrote reports and read newspapers — dates could have been provided, showing that events took their time.

Wait. Hastings was in New York? Yes, our man Hastings was mysteriously and providentially in New York, exactly when Poirot needed to learn about Rupert. I had a hard time with this scene because throughout the series, Hastings seems to have no family, no inheritance, and no visible means of support so what was he doing flying from California to New York? On a business trip? He has no job! Yet, if Hastings spent time regularly in the United States, he would have known what eggs over easy meant (we’re treated to a scene in which he expresses confusion after seeing them in a menu). He would have known they were called soft fried eggs in Britain. But I guess if we didn’t have the joke, there would be no reason to have the scene at all, since it didn’t move the plot forward a jot.

Another irritation is that Rupert got a major personality transplant which missed major dramatic possibilities but gave him a better reason for his suicide. Alas, both the original Rupert and the improved Rupert got short shrift. The film wasted valuable time panning slowly over the prop department’s fake Egyptian relics that could have been spent on characterization and making us care about the people involved.

Anyway.

In the short story, Rupert was a South Seas beachcomber and a remittance man. That is, he’s a ne’er-do-well whose family sends him money regularly to keep him as far away from home as possible. He can redeem himself as a man or drink himself to death but he won’t be around to embarrass his family. Story Rupert has a bad relationship with his uncle. Story Rupert has a friend who paid his way to Egypt. Lots of dramatic possibilities lurk.

Instead, we get Rupert the upstanding nephew, Yale graduate, and anointed heir to Felix the financier.

This Rupert has a stunning apartment in New York, a stunning fiancée (who never appears on-camera thus losing another reason to care about his suicide) and every reason to live. But he doesn’t. Hastings, always on the spot, reads his newspaper over eggs over easy and discovers that Felix died in Egypt. He rushes back to Rupert’s apartment and discovers the unlocked door and the body.

Wait. Rupert thoughtfully unlocked his door prior to shooting himself so his body could be more easily discovered by passing Englishmen? Apparently so.

Eventually, Poirot and Hastings arrive in Egypt. Hastings enjoys the drive to the archaeological site; Poirot does not. But he recovers quickly and expounds on superstition, leading everyone around him to think he believes in that sort of tommyrot. This is one section the film handled very well. In text and on film, Poirot is firm. He believes in the power of superstition. He is not superstitious. He understands that other people are and that their beliefs can be used to drive them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t or to believe lies told to them by trusted associates. Superstition is very powerful: It makes you believe.

This is why scenes were added to show Miss Lemon dabbling in spiritualism; it shows the power of belief. Miss Lemon uses tarot cards to discern what happened to her cat, followed by using the planchette for a round of automatic writing. She used the planchette correctly although I don’t know what she expected her dead cat to say other than “meow.” The tarot card scene proved the scriptwriter didn’t know his occult practices. You don’t use tarot cards to communicate with the spirit realm. You use them to forecast the future. If Miss Lemon wanted to know if a new cat would show up at her doorstep, the tarot cards might tell her. If she wanted to know what her dead cat thought of the replacement cat, she’d use the planchette.

The film handled superstition poorly in the digs. The crew seemed oblivious to what was going on with the higher-ups. If Men-Her-Ra had laid a curse on the tomb raiders, the crew would be nervous, gathering in angry knots, and looking anxious in the background. They’d walk off the site, leaving the archeologists to do the digging. But no. Instead, the native crew ambled out in a picturesque fashion when they could have been used to amplify the suspense.

There were too many missed opportunities here. I guess Pharoah’s curse really worked!

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.