It wouldn’t be Christmas without ‘Death on the Nile’ (1978) and ‘Evil Under the Sun’ (1982), usually shown on British television as a double bill but this year shown two days apart. ‘Death on the Nile’ was promoted to Christmas Day while ‘Evil Under the Sun’ is shown on BBC2 today at 4.35pm. In the unlikely event that you haven’t seen these magnificent films, make sure you do - and don’t read this until you have, as it contains spoilers.
‘Death on the Nile’ requires a little suspension of disbelief. The murder plot requires the murderer to be left alone for two minutes despite having just been shot in the leg in the saloon bar of a cruise ship. Fortunately for him, his shipmates are more concerned with looking after a drunk woman than tending to a man who has just (apparently) taken a bullet in the leg. This could not have been reasonably anticipated, nor could he have expected the gun and hankerchief to be recovered from the bottom of the Nile, but he expected it - and planned for it - nonetheless.
In fairness, someone does see him during these two minutes - Louise Bourget, who becomes the second victim - and it is all rollicking good fun so who cares?
‘Evil Under the Sun’ is also rollicking good fun. It is arguably even better, with a gloriously camp Roddy McDowall, a tremendously waspish Maggie Smith (“cherchez la fruit”) and Peter Ustinov adopting the Peter Sellers approach to French (Belgian) accents (“Halibi!”).
I have been watching this film for over 30 years and something has always bothered me about the plot. I am finally ready to get it off my chest. All this is written from memory so let me know in the comments if I have erred.
As Poirot explains in the denouement, Patrick Redfern arranges a rendez-vous with Arlena at Ladder Bay. Jealous wife Christine Redfearn unexpectedly shows up and Arlena scurries off into a cave to avoid her. When she comes out, Christine knocks her out by smacking her round the head with a rock. She remains unconcious in the cave while Christine dresses up as her, covers her head in Arlena’s big hat, plays dead and waits for Patrick to show up in a boat with Myra Gardener.
Patrick pronounces her dead and Myra leaves him with the body. Christine goes back to the hotel, washes off the fake sun tan and turns up for an arranged game of tennis as cool as a cucumber. Thanks to some antics with a watch, she has a perfect alibi. Patrick also has a perfect alibi because he and Myra apparently found Arlena’s dead body on the beach. In fact, she is not yet dead and Patrick strangles her to death once Myra is out of sight.
The business with Myra requires a good deal of serendipity. Her boat trip with Patrick is essential to his alibi and thus to the whole murder plot and yet it appears to be completely spontaneous. He is about to set sail when she suddenly asks him if she can accompany him. It is also fortuitous that she doesn’t decide to take a look at the body herself.
But that is a relatively minor quibble. The main point is this. Christine goes to great lengths to secure herself an alibi. As far as all the characters are concerned, she could not possibly have gone to Ladder Bay and back in the time she had available to her. So why didn’t she just kill Arlena herself? She had already knocked her out with a rock. Why bother complicating things by getting her accomplice to finish her off, thereby creating the need for another elaborate alibi?
We are told that Christine’s hands are too small to strangle Arlena, but even if we accept this dubious claim, there are other ways of killing people. She could have brought a bit of rope with her. She could have bashed her head in with a rock a few more times. It doesn’t make sense. People might have suspected her of doing it, but everyone had a reason for doing it and she already had a perfectly good alibi without going to all the trouble of putting on fake tan, covering her body from top to toe and having a suspicious bath in the middle of the day. Changing a timepiece and pretending to have vertigo would have sufficed.
The whole thing is unnecessarily over-complicated. If she was capable of smashing her head in with a rock, she was capable of killing her. It could - and should - have been a straightforward woman-on-woman assault on a beach with no witnesses.
In the book, things make more sense. In Christie’s original version, we are told that Christine does not have the physical or mental capacity to kill someone. When she appears on Ladder Bay, Arlena hides in a cave to avoid a confrontation and the whole business of Christine pretending to be dead and Patrick finding the ‘body’ takes place with Arlena hiding out of sight, apparently unable to hear or see what is going on.
This, again, requires a certain amount of good luck on the part of the murderers. The whole plan depends on Arlena choosing to hide in an appropriate place for a suitable length of time. The makers of the film may have found this implausible and so decided that Christine would have to knock Arlena unconscious, but in doing so they fundamentally changed Christine’s physical and psychological profile and made it seem implausible that a woman who has already twatted someone with a rock would not finish them off.
Still, great film.
Just watched it. Great film, though Maggie Smith does outshine everyone, and the shoehorning of her into as many bits of it as possible is a little too obvious. There isn't much crackle about any of the non-Maggie scenes.
Plot doesn't really work, though I think (without having read the original in ages) it's mostly that the psychological surprise isn't as perfect as it is in the book - the reversal that's totally unexpected, but, once seen, inevitable. Christie's never going to be appreciated by the sort of person who reads whodunnits in order to be able to guess in advance who dunnit, but adapters have to be really careful in altering the rhythm of her stories even a little bit. The murder(s), and ultimately the hanging(s), and the horror of them, have to be central - and they aren't in this adaptation.
Agatha Christie plots always involve some wild stroke of luck or oversight, don’t they? It sounds like she wrote this starting from “what if.. you saw what you thought was a dead body on a beach but it was actually someone else and they were still alive but the being seen gives you the perfect alibi even though you did it or will do it?”
Also not answered here: why would Patrick kill the victim? I may have paid too little attention (ignored warnings, haven’t seen the second film) but it seems odd unless she had some wowzer blackmail, which I suppose is always a good plot device.