Teresa Reviews “Death on the Nile” (2004)

Fidelity to text: 4 guns

It’s very close despite choosing different parts of the novel to keep as opposed to the 1978 version.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 1/2 guns

Very good, fast-moving, keeps one important character analysis scene which should have been kept in the 1978 version, but there were errors.

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

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Let’s get the most important point addressed first. The S.S. Karnak is portrayed by the Steamship Sudan. Sudan was built in 1921 as a luxury vessel for the Thomas Cook and Son travel company. She’s still in service today, gliding graciously up and down the Nile. You can even book the Agatha Christie suite!

Looking over those stateroom photographs show that she’s even more luxurious a ship than the movie indicates. Those staterooms also imply that — despite Salome Otterbourne’s complaints, this is one ship that will never experience a wave bigger than a ripple. Her wake leaves bigger ripples than what she sails through. The S.S. Sudan was not made to navigate any body of water more agitated than a bathtub. She’d flounder in the Mediterranean. She’d capsize in the Atlantic. What a stunner.

Another important point is the film opens with gratuitous nudity. This was an extremely poor choice. We get to watch Jackie and Simon frolicking in some garret bedroom. Except they aren’t frolicking. Nudity is very rarely required for artistic purposes; it certainly wasn’t needed here. We know Jackie and Simon adore each other, or at least they do before he meets Linnet Ridgeway, beautiful millionairess and Jackie’s best friend. So there they are, both in their very early twenties and, and … How can I say this. He’s a hunk and she’s hot and he’s so upset about their impending poverty preventing them from marrying that he can’t perform?

Really? Really? The director expects me to believe that a healthy, virile young man can’t get it up when he’s on top of a hot naked babe while they’re in private? That he’s impotent? No, absolutely not. This kind of scene exists only to show skin. If the writer and director had paid attention to what they were doing — instead of indulging their prurience — we could have watched Jackie and Simon agonize over their future poverty while sitting on a cold park bench and eating fish and chips from newspaper cones. That would have defined their unpleasant reality far more realistically and it wouldn’t have led me to think that Simon Doyle was impotent.

You don’t want to start a film with the audience suspecting that the leading man is less than a man. It was bad enough that Tim Allerton got emasculated. At least there were hints in the text that he wasn’t a hot-blooded, action-hero he-man. He was more the intellectual, refined type of man, one capable of planning risky, devious and foolproof robberies while diverting all suspicion away from himself. You could say that Tim Allerton employed the Scarlet Pimpernel school of camouflage, which does not make him any less of a man. In the novel, he and Rosalie Otterbourne get their happy-ever-after and he decides to come clean. In this film, he tells Rosalie she’s barking up the wrong tree. Aargh.

I suppose the director decided that Rosalie didn’t deserve happiness since she wasn’t a conventionally hot babe willing to take her clothes off for the camera. As if she hadn’t suffered enough as the daughter of Salome Otterbourne. I should be grateful that Cornelia did get her happy ending with Dr. Bessner, despite also not being a conventionally hot babe willing to take her clothes off for the camera. As in the text, she recognized Ferguson as an arrogant jerk, which was also nice.

I also didn’t like James Fox as Colonel Race. Colonel Race is supposed to be dashing, unflappable, a man of action. He rode in on a camel and departed the film, bit by bit, becoming increasingly inconsequential until he vanished into the Nile. I can’t see him using a sword-cane to dispatch a cobra. David Niven did a much better job in 1978 of retaining his masculinity while acting as Poirot’s sidekick.

Was there anything to like? Plenty. This version made it clearer that if Linnet Ridgeway hadn’t decided to steal her best friend’s fiancé, she would be alive to cope with her thieving lawyer. Poirot tells a very truncated version of Nathan’s speech to King David to Linnet (with, might I add, all biblical references removed despite the fact that Poirot is Catholic). She made her choice, reached out her hand, and took what she wanted. That is not to say he condones murder. Poirot never does.

I loved the scene in the luxury hotel in Cairo, where all the principals (except Colonel Race) are introduced and gossip about each other. Retaining Tim Allerton, his mother, and Joanna Southwood gave a taste of the larger world Linnet Ridgeway lived in and how people of her class thought. Joanna Southwood wouldn’t have thought that stealing some poor friend’s fiancé was wrong. If you’re poor, you deserve what you get. It was a good idea to ditch the Richetti subplot, the one that got Colonel Race onboard the S.S. Karnak in the first place. That was a complication too far. I liked seeing Cornelia Robson struggle with Miss Van Schuyler, even though it meant dropping Miss Bowers and her contentious relationship as Miss Van Schuyler’s companion.

Salome Otterbourne is fun as always. She’s so sure of herself, so flamboyant, so obsessed with sex and animal passions. I didn’t realize until researching Death on the Nile that Salome — exotic wardrobe and all — was based on Elinor Glyn, a flamboyant, confident, obsessed with sex and animal passions writer. Mark Twain, who didn’t hold much back, met Elinor Glyn but he didn’t write about what they discussed in his Autobiography. It was too salacious. Salome Otterbourne would revel in having a poem like this written about her:

Would you like to sin
With Elinor Glyn
On a tiger skin?
Or would you prefer
To err with her
On some other fur?

That’s Salome Otterbourne, or at least it was until her books stopped selling because they became too tame for the modern market. It was lucky for her to get murdered on a Nile cruise ship. Getting shot probably boosted her sales enormously and get her daughter out of debt. Salome was one of Agatha’s many sharp-edged portraits of writers tucked into her novels. She and Agatha even share a novel. Agatha’s first, unpublished romance was titled Snow Upon the Desert. Salome’s planned novel that she was researching during the Nile cruise, was titled Snow On the Desert’s Face.

Should you watch this version of Death on the Nile? Absolutely. In some ways, it’s truer to the novel than the Peter Ustinov version. It certainly moves quicker. Watch both versions, preferably within the same week. They complement each other beautifully, particularly when it comes to seeing murder done, clues ferreted out, and explanations made. Then you can ponder the choices, good and bad, that directors make.