Showing posts with label Angela Lansbury. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Angela Lansbury. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT 1964

When the world never seems to be living up to your dreams – "The Facts of Life" theme

A recent New York Times study found that most people’s music tastes peak somewhere around the ages of 13 to 16, concluding that as we age, we tend to gravitate to the music we listened to during our adolescence. I'm certain I would have balked at such a reductive claim back in my youth—given that throughout the '80s and '90s I listened to little else but what was played in heavy rotation on MTV. But today, having just turned 60, I skip right over the '80s and '90s and listen almost exclusively to early Motown, '70s disco, and ‘60s psychedelic pop...the music of my adolescence. 

I'm sure that had a comparable study been conducted about movies, the findings would be similar. That's definitely the case with me. I've long known that the films I fell in love with during my teenage years have played a significant role in the determining and shaping of my taste in motion pictures. Chiefly because they provided me with my earliest glimpses of adult life.
As a rule, when I was young I had little patience with movies featuring or marketed to kids my own age, and was chiefly drawn to movies about what I assumed was the infinitely more interesting world of grown-ups. But every now and then I came upon an exception.

Movies have explored the lives of teenagers in a great many coming-of-age films, but few have captured that curiously cocooned, exuberant, outside-adulthood-looking-in, bittersweet limbo state known as adolescence as fancifully as George Roy Hill’s The World of Henry Orient. A thoroughly enchanting and enduring comedy-drama about friendship, found families, and the efficacy of imagination in coping with the imperfect world of flawed adults and inadequate caretakers.
Peter Sellers as Henry Orient
Paula Prentiss as Stella Dunnworthy
Angela Lansbury as Isabel Boyd
Elizabeth "Tippy" Walker as Valerie Campbell Boyd
Merrie Spaeth as Marian Gilbert
Henry Orient (Peter Sellers) is a vainglorious, not overly-gifted avant-garde concert pianist whose life (which consists of surprisingly little piano playing and considerable skirt-chasing) is turned upside down by the worshipful attentions of a pair of dreamy teenage girls who have decided to make him the object of their romantic fantasies. The girls in question are eighth-graders Valerie Boyd (Tippy Walker) and Marian Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth). Both are new enrollees at the tony Norton’s School for Girls in Manhattan's Upper East Side who establish a rapport over shared orthodontic burdens (i.e., braces: Marian has “rubber bands,” Val sports “railroad tracks”). Plus, a mutual appreciation of their temple of learning:
Val: “Do you like it?”
Marian: “They say it’s the finest girls' school in the country.”
Val: “I don’t either.”

But chiefly they share an inarticulate loneliness and the 14-year-old’s gift for filling the void of unsatisfactory home lives with an immersion in vivid flights of fancy.
"Gil" and "Val" (as they call one another) dream about the ideal family life

Valerie, a born fantasist, is musically gifted and branded a misfit at school due to her high IQ and family-rooted developmental problems (“I’m unmanageable,” she boast-confesses about being kicked out of two schools in one year). Traipsing about New York with disheveled hair and wearing an old, full-length mink (a hand-down from her mother, no doubt), she suffers the neglect of wealthy, globe-trotting parents (Angela Lansbury and Tom Bosley). Marian, an impressionable pragmatist of humbler circumstances than her private school peers (“Don’t tell me you finally found a friend in that snob hatchery!”), comes from a loving but broken home where she’s looked after by her divorced mother (Phyllis Thaxter) and materteral family friend, “Boothy” (Bibi Osterwald). 
Bibi Osterwald as Erica "Boothy" Booth and Phyllis Thaxter as Mrs. Avis Gilbert
 taking in a Henry Orient concert: "If this is music, what's that stuff Cole Porter writes?"

When a string of fateful, frightful coincidences consistently throw Val and Marian into the path of the playboy pianist --literally, in one instance--the girls, convinced of destiny’s intervention, swear blood-oath, lifelong devotion to their beloved. That Val & Marian’s ardent attentions come to inadvertently wreak havoc on Henry’s attempts to seduce a very-married patron of the arts (the wonderful Paula Prentiss, stealing every scene) is where The World of Henry Orient finds its humor. That the eyes of a couple of quixotic 14-year-olds can transform a mediocre musician and world-class phony into the fulfilled embodiment of all that is artistically pure and romantic in life is where The World of Henry Orient finds its heart.
"And then two small bladders came out of their mouths!"
Henry Orient describing his first sighting of Val and Marian 

Set in a romanticized New York that never existed (something the film’s young stars were dismayed to discover when in real-life they reenacted the scene where a concerned mob rushes to the aid of one of the girls as she feigns illness on a busy city street [in real-life, apathetic pedestrians merely stepped over them]), The World of Henry Orient celebrates the emotional resiliency of the young, suggesting that a fertile imagination is ofttimes the only line of defense afforded those vulnerable souls whose fate it is to make the best of the messes adults make of their lives.

That both comedy and dramatic conflict arise out of the struggle to maintain a hopeful dreaminess in the face of disillusionment and the inevitable eye-opening of maturity is what makes The World of Henry Orient an uncommonly insightful film about teenagers that also contains a few lessons for adults.
The Family You Create Can Be More Important Than The One You're Born Into
A particularly well-played and sensitively written scene has Mrs. Gilbert and Boothy, in an empathetic effort to make Val feel less self-conscious about her daily visits to a psychiatrist, both confess (to the surprise of Marian) to having "hit the couch" at one time or another in their past.

The timeline of its release and its favorable reception places The World of Henry Orient right at the start of the "youth wave" in motion pictures. Released one year after the first Beach Party moviea genre noted for its overage teens and absentee parentsThe World of Henry Orient is distinguished by being a film about adolescents whose stars are actually adolescents (Walker and Spaeth were 16 and 15, respectively). 
Like Disney’s The Parent Trap (released two years earlier), The World of Henry Orient, too, is about teens from broken homes, but its approach isn't as sanitized. The World of Henry Orient came out two years before another Hayley Mills film-The Trouble with Angels, and shares with it the rarefied status of being a major motion picture featuring female protagonists...their relationships and points of view...as the central focus of the narrative.

Based on Nora Johnson's debut novel first published in 1958, The World of Henry Orient was inspired by her New York childhood and the adolescent crush she harbored for pianist Oscar Levant (Levant is the French word for Orient, explaining the title character’s unusual last name). It was adapted for the screen by her father, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath, How to Marry a Millionaire, Black Widow), whose extensively reworked screenplay is purported to have been completed without his daughter’s participation, but (perhaps in an effort to make up for being such a non-presence in her early life...the Johnsons divorced when Nora was five) he nevertheless granted her a co-writing credit and billing above his own.
Old-School Fangirls
The World of Henry Orient was released a month before The Beatles' first visit to the U.S. 

As autobiographical first novels go, Nora Johnson’s paean to the power of imagination to compensate for the absence of parental attention was the teenage antithesis to Françoise Sagan’s 1954 mordant memoir Bonjour Tristesse (written when Sagan was 18, Johnson’s when she was 25). While both books benefited from unsentimental perspectives, the essentially optimistic teens of Henry Orient were far more recognizable to American audiences than Sagan's cynical sophisticate. Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay lightened the tone of his daughter’s novel, fashioning it into a delightful, genuinely witty comedy with humor derived from character as much as calamity.
Noteworthy for the appealingly natural performances of its two leads, the film improves upon the book by eliminating Val’s therapist and fleshing out the girls' relationships with the adult characters via a three-pronged structure that matches the plot's shifting narrative perspective with corresponding variations in tone.
Henry Orient's offbeat piano concerto (featuring a factory whistle and a bass drum struck by a sack of potatoes) was composed by Ken Lauber, who appears in the film as the exasperated conductor

First, there's the coming-of-age comedy, which follows the breezy adventures of two girls loose in a picture-postcard vision of New York. Then there's the bedroom farce, which chronicles Henry's broadly-played attempts to seduce Stella. Finally, we have the adult satire which presents the adults of Henry Orient as the reality counterpoint to the fantasy world the girls have created for themselves. As the movie explores the differing ways in which children and adults deal with life's disappointments, The World of Henry Orient never once condescends to the girls, nor does it make all adults out to be fools or villains. Rather, the film treats all the characters with wry affection and a surprising amount of empathy.  
Paula Prentiss's elegant eccentricity brightens every scene. I can't--nor do I want to---watch anyone else.
She and Sellers reteamed the following year in What's New, Pussycat?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As a kid who spent a great deal of his adolescence in a paradoxical effort to both escape into and find myself within the flickering images of a movie screen; what I most relate to in The World of Henry Orient is the way it so entertainingly dramatizes the way young people, nonautonomous and dependent upon parents, can find temporary happiness in substituting dreams for reality when that reality is found wanting.
The film makes its points in emotionally perceptive ways. In particular, I like the scene where Val and Marian share a secret smile when the clock strikes six, the time of the day Marian confesses to most missing her absent and remarried father.
The film's only sour notes come when the girls, taking their cue from their idol's last name, lapse into the kind of non-malicious, yet nonetheless cringe-inducing, stereotypical Asian behavior (broken English, bowing) that we now recognize as casual racism. While nothing on the scale of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, the scenes are still plenty embarrassing and ultimately disappointing. 

Special mention must also be made of Elmer Bernstein's splendid musical score which enlivens every scene, and the sensational New York locations. It makes Manhattan look like a kids' Playland.


PERFORMANCES
There are exceptions, but as a rule, I’m inclined to find most child actors annoying. They’re like some kind of dreamscape hybrid creature--juvenile bodies possessed of a lifetime’s worth of artifice and affectation. Paradoxically, I’m not much fonder of the practice of pawning off getting-on-in-years actors like Ann-Margret (Bye Bye Birdie) and John Travolta (Grease) as high-schoolers either, but of the two, I find adults posing as kids to be less grating. Therefore, the biggest miracle and greatest source of delight in The World of Henry Orient are the relaxed, genuinely likable performances given by its two age-appropriate, unknown, inexperienced leads making their film debuts. 
With her deliciously icy turn as Val’s disinterested mother, the ever-faultless Angela Lansbury was more than ready to bring a close to nearly two decades’ worth of playing unsympathetic character roles. She ultimately traded in her withering gaze and wry delivery for twinkly smiles and Broadway musical-comedy legend status. TV-familiar Tom Bosley (Happy Days) is very good as the distracted dad, but at 35 to Lansbury’s 37, Bosley felt he was “A little too young to be Angela’s husband.”

I don’t know how George Roy Hill did it, but Walker and Spaeth give such spirited, engagingly unselfconscious performances that it's hard to believe this is their first film. (One unsavory contributing factor perhaps influencing Walker's performance is that during filming, the married-with-children, 44-year-old director embarked on a creepy, purportedly platonic “relationship” with the 16-year-old former model which lasted several years). The quality of the young women's work (particularly Walker, who’s so heartbreaking in the film’s third act) is made all the more remarkable when contrasted with the patent amateurishness of the two equally inexperienced teenage girls cast by William Castle (per his usual copycat fashion) in  I Saw What You Did (1965). Trade periodicals from the time reveal that The World of Henry Orient was originally envisioned as a vehicle for Hayley Mills and Patty Duke, but I can’t imagine either of those seasoned vets improving upon the performances of these charismatic novices.
Character actor Al Lewis (aka "Grandpa" Munster) is a riot as a shopkeeper
 who fervently wants to be of assistance to Jayne Mansfield

Having made a splash in Lolita (1962), The Pink Panther (1963), and Dr. Stangelove (1964), The World of Henry Orient was Peter Sellers’ first American film. Renowned for his skill in playing multiple roles in several of his films, I am nevertheless relieved that Sellers only plays one part in The World of Henry Orient, for as much as I like him, a little of Sellers can go a very long way. His top-billed role here is more of a showy guest star turn, the innate theatricality of the self-enchanted Orient allowing Sellers to shine in a brilliantly exaggerated manner, while simultaneously preventing him from overstaying his welcome. His Henry Orient is one of my favorite Sellers performances precisely because it's one of the few to actually leave me wanting more.
The most lauded and commented-upon aspect of his characterization (deservedly so) is the way the Brooklyn born pianist’s accent keeps slipping from Bulgarian, French, Italian, and back to Brooklynese, depending on the situation. When on the make, his Henry Orient comes across like a guy who learned about seduction from watching reruns of Renso Cesana as The Continental
"I will give someone 1,000 dinars who can find one gray hair on my head!"
My partner harbors such a deep-rooted antipathy towards Peter Sellers that I actually resorted to trickery to get him to watch The World of Henry Orient. I began the film after the opening credits had rolled, and my partner fell in love with the film before he even recognized it was Peter Sellers (he thought it was Gene Kelly in "The Pirate" mode).


THE STUFF OF DREAMS 
There’s no arguing that representation matters, but in the movies and TV shows of the ‘60s, adolescent girls almost exclusively saw themselves represented in ways subordinate to and reflective of a negative adolescent male perspective (“Dumb ol’ Margaret” in Dennis the Menace, or “creepy” Judy in Leave it to Beaver). The lone exceptions and only TV programs I recall in which the lives and relationships of adolescent girls were central and presented as genuine were The Patty Duke Show and Gidget.
There have always been motion pictures with teenage girls as central characters within the framework of larger, family-centric stories: i.e., A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Actress (1953), and Pollyanna (1960). And some—like Margie (1946), A Date with Judy (1948), and the “Tammy” and “Gidget” franchises—even placed teenage girls front-and-center of their own stories. Unfortunately, the storylines of these films were so often devoted to the heroine’s romantic misadventures that all other female characters were depicted as either rivals or bullies. Female friendships were a rarity.

“One thing about unwanted children, they soon learn how to take care of themselves”
Val and Marian’s liberating flights of fantasy are repeatedly intruded upon by adults (the concerned crowd, the overly-helpful shopkeeper, the parent with no respect for privacy), all events that underscore themes relating to the vulnerability of adolescence and the sometimes-dispiriting lack of control the young have over their circumstances.


I grew up in a house with four sisters drawn to (and catching me up in their orbit) entertainments centered around female characters. Unfortunately, for these four beautiful, vibrant Black girls with imagination and confidence to spare, images of themselves in movies and TV during the '60s were virtually non-existent, except as totems of white tolerance in special “social problem” episodes of their favorite TV shows. Even during the ‘70s, when I could find glimpses of my own existence in the teenage Black males at the center of The Learning Tree (1969), Sounder (1972), and Cooley High (1975); I can think of only one film from the entire decade that was about a black teenage girl: Ossie Davis’1972 film Black Girl.
Local Color
Angela Lansbury's Tony Award-winning turn in Broadway's Mame was still two years off, but this party scene looks like an early dry-run for the "It's Today!" number. The only scene in the film to significantly feature actors of color, its objective is to illustrate her character's high-style sophistication

Forced to live within themselves and cling to any depiction of girlhood they could get (movie-wise, Hayley Mills and Annette Funicello were pretty much it), all of my sisters responded enthusiastically to The World of Henry Orient when it aired on TV. None more so than my next-to-oldest sister, the film buff and Beatles fan who dragged me to The Trouble with Angels more times than I can count, and for whom The World of Henry Orient was something of a mirror into her life. To say she liked this movie is a serious understatement. This film spoke to her.

A Catholic school girl well-acquainted with feeling like a misfit, my sister was Val to her best girlfriend’s Gil; together they would spend entire Saturdays roaming the city of Denver, Colorado (where we lived before moving to San Francisco) creating mischief and having adventures. When she watched The World of Henry Orient—which she did, rapturously, every time it aired—it was clear to me that the big smile on her face was a smile of recognition. Not physical recognition, for no one in the film looked like her at all (it would be many years before she ever saw an authentic depiction of herself onscreen), but emotional recognition: I could tell she was responding to seeing just a little bit of her inner self reflected back to her from the TV screen.
Black Girl Excellence
An unforeseen reaction to my seeing Annie (2014): a multimillion-dollar musical built around a 10-year-old Black girl (Quvenzhane Wallis): and Black Panther (2018): a global blockbuster featuring a 16-year-old Black girl who is a science genius and warrior (Letitia Wright); was how often I found myself brought to tears watching these beautiful young women, thinking about what such images would have meant to my sisters growing up.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
If part of our contemporary pop culture (fashion, the music industry) appears to be in a race to have girls acquire the tools to sexualize and objectify themselves as early as possible, another part (books, films, TV, behind-the-scenes production) feels as though it is listening to the creative and artistic voices of women and girls of all types. With more women—gay, straight, trans, Black, Asian, Latina—telling their own stories and becoming involved in the fields of writing, directing, and producing; I look forward to the day when there are more movies about the lives and friendships of girls. When a movie like The World of Henry Orient is more the cinematic norm than the rapturous rarity it remains.


BONUS MATERIAL
In 1967 The World of Henry Orient was turned into a flop Broadway musical. Both the film's director and screenwriter collaborated on the stage production which ran a scant three months, garnered two Tony Award nominations, and featured Golden Age 20th-Century Fox musical star Don Ameche in the Peter Sellers role. The show, if remembered at all, is cited for the participation of a young Pia Zadora, the dances by choreographer Michael Bennett, and the appearance of several original members of A Chorus Line.

Twenty years after playing the unhappily-married Boyds in The World of Henry Orient, Angela Lansbury and Tom Bosley reunited on considerably more amicable terms as author Jessica Fletcher and Sheriff Amos Tupper on the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote


AUTOGRAPH FILES
I wish I could remember something about the circumstances surrounding getting this Tom Bosley autograph. In its stead, I suppose I should be grateful that I at least recorded the date.



Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

Saturday, January 24, 2015

DEATH ON THE NILE 1978

On the occasion of having completed a collection of Agatha Christie mystery novels gifted to me by my partner at Christmas (in hardback yet!), I’ve taken the opportunity to revisit 1978’s Death on the Nile, the second film in the unofficial Poirot Trilogy from British producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin (Murder on the Orient Express -1974, Death on the Nile -1978, Evil Under the Sun - 1982).

Released in the fall of 1978 at the height of America's Tut-Mania born of the 1976-1979 tour of The Treasures of Tutankhamun museum exhibit, Death on the Nile was a less stylish, not quite all-star follow-up to the wildly successful Murder on the Orient Express, and marked the first appearance of Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. It seems Albert Finney declined the opportunity to reprise his Oscar-nominated performance from that first film after considering the rigors of applying and wearing the extensive Poirot makeup and prosthetics in the triple-degree heat of the Egyptian desert.
Lacking, for my taste anyway, the star quality Finney brought to the role which made him more an equal participant in the proceedings, Ustinov nevertheless brings a character actor’s zest to his interpretation of Poirot, making the character uniquely his own. Ustinov would go on to play Christie’s Belgian sleuth in two more feature films (Evil Under the Sun and the awful-beyond-imagining Appointment With Death) and three contemporized TV-movies.
Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot
Bette Davis as Mrs. Marie Van Schuyler
David Niven as Colonel Race 
Mia Farrow as Jacqueline De Bellefort
Simon MacCorkindale as Simon Doyle
Lois Chiles as Linnet Ridgeway
Jack Warden as Dr. Bessner
Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Salome Otterbourne
George Kennedy as Andrew Pennington
Maggie Smith as Miss Bowers
Jon Finch as Mr. Ferguson
Olivia Hussey as Rosalie Otterbourne
Jane Birkin as Louise Bourget

As a huge fan of Murder on the Orient Express but having missed the opportunity to catch it on the big screen, I made sure to see Death on the Nile the day it opened. I recall the audience as being sparse but appreciative, and I remember enjoying the film a great deal; albeit more for its cast and surprising twists of plot (it’s quite a puzzler of a mystery and hands-down the bloodiest film in the series) than anything particularly noteworthy about its execution.

Murder on the Orient Express was a glamorous, cinema-inspired recreation of an era, purposefully romanticized and steeped in nostalgia. Death on the Nile, under the journeyman, traffic-cop guidance of large-scale logistics director John Guillermin (The Towering Inferno, King Kong), is, on the other hand, a murder mystery well-told, but one devoid of either mood or atmosphere. The claustrophobic tension of a luxury passenger train is traded for the more scenic vistas offered by a majestic paddle steamer cruising down the Nile. Anthony Powell’s dazzling, Academy Award-winning costume designs do most of the heavy-lifting in the glamour department; meanwhile, the visual splendor of the British countryside and sunny, travelogue-worthy scenes of Egyptian landmarks offset the film's otherwise straightforward, TV-movie presentation.
  
Putting the best spin on it possible, Death on the Nile’s competent but indifferent direction and utter lack of visual distinction immediately put to rest any inclination on my part to compare this film to its (again, to my taste) far superior predecessor. Divested of any expectation to duplicate that film’s elegant, diffused-light visual style or compete with its first-class pedigree cast, I was able to better appreciate Death on the Nile on its own modest, nonetheless worthwhile, merits.
Intelligently and wittily adapted by playwright Anthony Schaffer (Sleuth) from Christie’s 1937 novel (which began life as a stage play alternately titled, Moon on the Nile and Murder on the Nile), Death on the Nile finds Poirot (Ustinov) vacationing in Egypt aboard a river vessel jam-packed with potential victims and suspects. The guests include: Poirot’s distinguished friend Colonel Race (Niven), an imperious dowager (Davis) and her mannish nurse (Smith); a dipsomaniacal romance novelist and her soft-spoken daughter (Lansbury and Hussey); a pompous Austrian physician (Warden); a peevish Socialist (Finch); a calculating American lawyer (Kennedy); a rancorous French maid (Birkin); and a too-rich, too-beautiful, too-happy couple on their honeymoon, (Chiles and MacCorkindale). Oh, and there's also a vengeful scorned woman (Farrow), MacCorkindale's former fiance.

As is to be expected, not a single soul aboard the good ship Karnak is there merely by chance, each life connecting and intersecting in the most intriguing, mysterious ways. The fun to be had in Death on the Nile is seeing these diverse personalities clash. The entertainment is found trying to stay one step ahead as the details of the masterfully intricate mystery at the center of the story come to be revealed.
Bette Davis  looks to be channeling a future Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey, while Maggie Smith is putting out a serious Tilda Swinton vibe

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Death on the Nile is one of those movies that plays much better today than when it was released.
When Murder on the Orient Express opened in 1974, its all-star cast and artful recreation of a bygone era rode the crest of the '70s nostalgia craze and the public mania for star-studded disaster films. But by the time Death on the Nile was made, the cultural climate had changed significantly. Thanks to the popularity of the TV miniseries, the guest star face-lift parade that was The Love Boat,  and the last gasps of the disaster film mania (Airport 77, The Swarm, Avalanche): all-star casts no longer meant glamorous...they became synonymous with cheesy.
And while not officially a sequel to Murder on the Orient Express (although conceived as one) Death on the Nile was perceived as a sequel in the minds of the public, and thus also fell victim to the overall cultural disenchantment with the glut of uninspired sequels Hollywood churned out in hopes of duplicating earlier successes: The Godfather Part II, Jaws 2, The French Connection IIThe Exorcist: The Heretic.
People seeing Death on the Nile today see the classic stars of All About Eve, My Man Godfrey (David Niven, the 1957 remake), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Rosemary’s Baby, The Manchurian Candidate, Romeo and Juliet, and The Great Gatsby, all appearing in the same film. But back in 1978, the film's biggest stars, Bette Davis and David Niven, were appearing on TV or in low-rent Disney movies, Peter Ustinov was best known as "That old dude in Logan's Run," Mia Farrow had not yet hitched her wagon to Woody Allen, Angela Lansbury was better known on Broadway, and George Kennedy was like the James Franco of the disaster genre: unavoidable and seemingly in everything.

Time has been kind, however, and the biggest treat now is being able to enjoy all these great stars - many of them no longer with us - in a handsomely-mounted old-fashioned film, looking so outrageously young, entertaining us with the kind of marvelous, once-in-a-lifetime talent it was once so easy for us to take for granted.
Swag
If you ain't got elegance you can never, ever carry it off

PERFORMANCES
Just to lodge two main performance complaints from the getgo: 1) Lois Chiles is drop-dead gorgeous, but I've never understood how she landed so many plum roles in high-profile films. When it comes to flat line readings, she really gives Michelle Phillips (Valentino) a run for her money. 2) Simon MacCorkindale's performance would have improved tenfold had he just been given a scene or two sans shirt or in bathing trunks. It certainly did wonders for Nicholas Clay's characterization in Evil Under the Sun.
Dressed to Kill
I love ensemble films, but it's almost impossible to write about individual performances without appearing to intentionally slight those not mentioned. I like the cast assembled for Death on the Nile, the weaker actors benefiting from roles requiring them to play a single note; the stronger ones running with the opportunity and creating memorable, ofttimes hilarious, characterizations. Anyone studying acting should keep their eye on David Niven, his silent reactionswhether exasperation at having to play audience to one of Poirot's frequent self-aggrandizing speeches, or delighting in seeing his friend taken down a pegare more eloquent than most of the film's dialogue.

As a fan of bitchy dialogue, I find every scene with Bette Davis and Maggie Smith to be pure gold. Their pairing is genuinely inspired. Jack Warden is the master of comical bluster, George Kennedy cleaned up isn't half bad, and I like seeing Mia Farrow and Lois Chiles reunited—they played best friends in 1974s The Great Gatsby—their roles here casting Farrow as a Gatsby-esque character losing her true love to the dazzle of wealth. It helps that Farrow is much more compelling as a woman on the edge than she was as Gatsby's dream girl.
The radiant Olivia Hussey (last seen sliding around on bookcases in Lost Horizon) and the late Jon Finch. Finch, looking thinner here than he did in Macbeth, was diagnosed with diabetes in 1974. 

Even after having read three Hercule Poirot novels, my mental image of the detective is not so defined as to find any fault with Ustinov's portrayal. Although I personally prefer Finney, Ustinov's more sensitive take on the detective (he has a marvelously heartbreaking exchange with Farrow near the end) is quite good.
Although I read somewhere that the actress feels she went a little over the top in the theatricality of her performance, I absolutely adore Angela Lansbury in this. Light years away from Murder She Wrote's Jessica Fletcher or her Miss Marple in 1980's lamentable The Mirror Crack'd (but with a hint of Sweeney Todd's Mrs. Lovett) Lansbury's tipsy romance novelist:  "Snow on the Sphinx's Face", "Passion Under the Persimmon Tree" - is the comic highlight of the film for me.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Death on the Nile's only Oscar win is also its only Academy nod. Anthony Powell won Best Costume Design for his eye-popping period creations; costumes that indelibly establish the identities of each member of the sizable cast with style, wit, and considerable theatrical panache. Although I'm surprised to learn his equally astonishing designs for Evil Under the Sun failed to get a nomination, as a six-time nominee and three-time winner (Travels With My Aunt, Tess, Death on the Nile), I don't suppose Powell is losing any sleep over it.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
There's a sense of one having one's cake and eating it too when I think of how I only recently came to read the works of Agatha Christie so many years after first seeing the film adaptations. I was able to enjoy the mystery and suspense of the films as intended, with no foreknowledge of their outcome or the identity of the killer, but reading the books after the fact has the pleasant effect of filling in some of the narrative blanks and backstory impossible to include in a film.
What I liked so much about the film version of Murder on the Orient Express is that in addition to a crackling murder mystery, it offered, by way of subtext, a poignant illustration of the manner in which a single act of violence can have a rippling effect resulting in the harm done to one ultimately wounding a great many others. The film version of Death on the Nile I’ve always felt suffered from being too much of a tale told expediently. It’s a great mystery with interesting characters and many surprises, but I never felt it had anything larger to express. Certainly, nothing to justify that aforementioned choke in Poirot’s throat at the end of the film.
Poirot and Colonel Race call the attention of the ship's manager (I.S. Johar) to a matter not at all pleasant
Happily, the novel (which, short of a few excised characters, has been faithfully adapted for the screen) expounds upon the larger thematic threads connecting the characters and their actions. Themes relating to secrets kept, risks taken, and fatal sacrifices made in the name of protecting those we're afraid are incapable of taking care of themselves.
And while I feel fairly safe in stating that little to none of these themes factor in John Guillermin's film adaptation, keeping it in the back of my mind as I rewatched Death on the Nile did wonders for my reappraisal of it.



BONUS MATERIAL
Because so many fans of Death on the Nile have expressed feeling shortchanged by Simon MacCorkindale remaining fully-clothed throughout, by way of compensation I offer this screencap of Mr. Mac from the 1987 straight-to-video film: Shades of Love: Sincerely, Violet. A least that director knew man cannot live by Sphinx alone.
Simon Says: Eat your heart out

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 -2015