Death on the Nile
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Movie Reviews of Death on the Nile
Movie Review: Death on the Nile
Summary: 5 Stars
An engrossing story, played out by an excellent cast. Location and scenery are a big plus. I love this movie.Movie Review: "Death" is great!
Summary: 5 Stars
One of Agatha Christie's very best stories and a super movie! Great cast and a surprise ending - as usual.Movie Review: EXCELLENT! SUPERB! A MASTER PIECE
Summary: 5 Stars
EXCELLENT!! That's all I can say.... A masterpiece.. a "must have" in your dvd collection.Movie Review: Death on the Nile - the movie
Summary: 5 Stars
Movie came quickly and was as good as advertised. Would order from this seller again.Movie Review: For sheer pleasurable escapism, what can beat sailing down the Nile with Hercule Poirot?
Summary: 4 Stars
For some reason, I always thought that "Death on the Nile" was a marginal Agatha Christie adaptation, one that certainly paled in comparison to the great "Murder on the Orient Express", which was produced some five years earlier. So I never bothered to see it. Well, I finally caught up with the movie on DVD, and, boy, was I wrong. "Death on the Nile" is a really good movie.
You get so much here: exotic scenery; a great set where most of the story takes place (an early 20th century steamer); about a dozen famous actors giving top-notch performances (some understated, some slightly scenery-chewing, but all entertaining); solid direction by John Guillerman; a polished screenplay by Anthony Shaffer (Hitchcock's "Frenzy"); and, to top it all off, a wonderful, memorable score by Nino Rota ("The Godfather").
And the film features the best kind of Agatha Christie murder plot and solution: one that is sufficiently complex, but understandable and believable (at least in the world of the movie) once the great Hercule Poirot explains it all to us. It also helps that the solution is genuinely clever.
Is "Death on the Nile" as great as "Murder on the Orient Express"? In the end, probably not. But the worst one can really say is that "Murder" is a lush, epic, beautiful film that just happens to be a murder mystery, while "Death" is clearly part of the murder mystery genre from the outset. But there's nothing wrong with a really great murder mystery, and this film is one of them.
The DVD features an excellent widescreen print that's sharp and bright, and a handful of interesting extras, including a 24-minute behind-the-scenes featurette produced at the time of the film's release (probably for the emerging cable market) and a couple of interviews conducted by a Spanish journalist, where we get to see Peter Ustinov answer questions quite well with his servicable Spanish (conveniently subtitled in English).
By the way, I finally saw this movie not because I'm an Agatha Christie fan (though I am such a fan, as many of my Amazon reviews readily demonstrate), but because I'm doing a favor for my wife and watching with her all the movies available on DVD that feature the great Bette Davis, in their original release order. It's been fun. However, by the time the late 1970's rolled around, there weren't any true "Bette Davis movies" anymore, only movies that offered small or moderate character roles for the once top box office draw. So, in addition to everything else that's good about the film, one gets to see Bette Davis in one of her last five or six roles here. It's not a huge, memorable role (apparently Ms. Davis was disappointed that this movie wasn't able to do for her what "Murder on the Orient Express" did for Ingrid Bergmann, namely earn her another late-career Academy Award), but seeing her is one more pleasure in a film rich with pleasures great and small.