Word: farrowing
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Death on the Nile, by this standard, is a good Christie movie. The film opens on the lush greens and browns of the sprawling English country estate of Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles), who agrees to do best friend Jackie (Mia Farrow) a favor by hiring her fiance as groundskeeper. Fiance (Simon MacCarkindale)--Cambridge-educated, handsome, but broke--shows up, and he and Linnet engage in heavy eye contact. Soon it's wedding bells, but not not Mia, who devotes herself to pursuing the lovebirds around the world and ruining their honeymoon. She pops up on top of a pyramid...
...floating powder keg needs only a spark to explode. It soon gets one, as Mia Farrow shows up again and boards the cruise. One night in the saloon she shoots her ex-lover in the leg, dropping the gun on the floor in panic. The doctor leads Fiance away, while the socialite's companion (a nurse) looks after Mia. When the Marxist goes for the gun, it's missing. Next morning, Ridgeway is found shot, with a J drawn in blood on the wall next to her. But it can't be Jackie, who was in sight of the nurse...
...stop taking offense so often for being called French, not Belgian. Still, that's the screenwriter's fault more than Ustinov's. Niven is the quintessential unflappable Englishman, Bette Davis is right at home as a rich old bitch, and Chiles is a fine wealthy corpse. Mia Farrow is convincingly half-crazy, as usual. Some of the characters are drawn a little woodenly, and the script is nothing much to speak of. But then, neither is the Christie original. As detective stories go, this one is pretty good, what with the beauty of Egypt thrown in above and beyond...
...Farrow as the jilted lover of Linnet's new husband; George Kennedy as her American lawyer, trying to hide his raids on her assets; Jack Warden as a doctor who feels Linnet has been slandering him; and Angela Lansbury, who is about to lose a libel suit Linnet has brought against her. There are also a mistreated maid and a handsome young Communist who have their class differences to settle with...
...stylized murder-mystery character, he seems to lack the energy to fill in the kind of details that can, in masterly hands, utterly charm and disarm. There are possibilities, for example, in the bickering of Davis and Smith, but they peter out. There are promising hints of giddiness in Farrow's lovelorn posturings, but they too get lost in the toils of the plotting, and nothing much comes of doctor, lawyer or Communist. Even Poirot's fastidiousness and egocentricity are not used to full comic effect, Shaffer electing to go for the easy, running gags that involve...