Word: ridgeway
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...Bette Davis) and her bitchy companion (Maggie Smith) have set out for the same cruise, as have the novelist Salome Ottoban and her daughter. When Linnet's cheating lawyer (George Kennedy) hears of her marriage, his shady schemes are jeopardized and he sets off for Egypt to protect himself. Ridgeway's English lawyers are watching him, and they dispatch David Niven to the scene. Simultaneously, the Viennese doctor is trying to persuade Ridgeway not to go on trying to ruin his clinic, which has caused her friend to die, and the Marxist and Poirot are on the same boat. Small...
...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 all night. Elimination time...
...husband can't walk with a broken leg. The doctor? He had a motive, which Poirot overheard while eavesdropping, but he seems too weakwilled to kill. The Marxist--who Poirot heard saying in a just world Ridgeway "would be killed as a warning to the others"--possible, but unlikely. The maid, who discovered the body, might have done it, since Ridgeway would not give her her salary and let her go to meet her husband-to-be. How about the socialite, who might have done it to get the pearls, which are discovered missing? Who knows...
...story, of course, is Agatha Christie's: a closed-room, or rather a closed-ship murder mystery. The most significant victim is Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles), an heiress taking a Nile cruise for her honeymoon. As it develops, just about everyone in first class has both motive and opportunity to do her in. Naturally, one does not imagine that Dame Agatha's immortal detective, Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), pulled any triggers, and one can only spare the odd suspicious thought for Colonel Rice (David Niven), who assists him in his investigation. But that leaves plenty of others: Bette...