Given the critical and commercial success of Sidney Lumet's 1974 film adapation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, it was a no-brainer that producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin would return to the same well. It is little surprise that they turned to Death on the Nile for their next film, as it offered a remarkably similar narrative set-up to Orient Express, the presence of popular Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, and a title that tracks almost exactly with the earlier film (replace "Murder" with "Death" and "Orient Express" with "Nile"). The irony, of course, is that so much else changed between the two productions. While Anthony Shaffer (Frenzy, Sleuth) returned as screenwriter after doing uncredited rewrites on the previous film, Lumet was replaced by British director John Guillermin, who had recently helmed the big-budget American spectacles The Towering Inferno (1974) and King Kong (1976), and Albert Finney, who was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Poirot, was replaced by Peter Ustinov (the story is that Finney, having disliked all the make-up he had to wear, rejected the role when he learned he would have to wear the same make-up, but this time in the North African heat). The role fit Ustinov remarkably well, and he effectively made the character his own rather than aping Finney's approach, which led him to play Poirot in two more features and three made-for-television films over the next decade.

Most of the story takes place in 1937 aboard the Karnak, an old-fashioned steamer on which a group of wealthy American and European travellers is touring the Nile from Shellal to Wadi Halfa in Egypt. Much of the film was shot on location in Egypt, and cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who lensed several of Powell and Pressburger's most famous films, makes the most of the far-flung locations before the story settles down within the elegant confines of the ship. We are first given the backstory of the romantic triangle among wealthy heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles), her husband Simon Doyle (Simon MacCorkindale), and her former best friend Jacqueline De Bellefort (Mia Farrow), from whom she stole Simon while they were engaged. Linnet and Simon are on their honeymoon in Egypt, riding Arabian stallions through the desert and climbing to the top of the pyramids, all the while being followed and harassed by Jackie, who is romantically distraught and has possibly lost her mind.

Jackie follows them onto the Karnack, where they mix and mingle with the amusingly eccentric gaggle of passengers, which includes Jackie's lawyer Andrew Pennington (George Kennedy) and her maid Louise Bourget (Jane Birkin); sex-obsessed, inebriate romance novelist Salome Otterbourne (Angela Lansbury) and her daughter Rosalie (Olivia Hussey); Das Kapital-reading graduate student James Ferguson (Jon Finch); Bavarian doctor Ludwig Bessner (Jack Warden); and aged socialite Mrs. Van Schuyler (Bette Davis) and her nurse Miss Bowers (Maggie Smith). Also on board, of course, is Hercule Poirot and Colonel Race (David Niven), an old friend who becomes his partner in sleuthing.

The replacement of "Murder" with "Death" in the title is significant because, rather than a single murder, there is an escalating body count this time. Poirot winds up investigating multiple murders in the wake of a first murder, the victim of which I will not divulge here, although it will be obvious to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Christie's plot mechanics (let's just say that, by the half-hour mark, it is clear that everyone on screen has a reason to want to kill a particular character). What is surprising is how bloody the film is; Guillermin is no Sam Peckinpah, but there is a spurting head shot, a massive pool of blood from a slit throat, and repeated close-ups of a ghastly gunshot wound to the temple that reminds us how much violence could slide in under a PG rating in the late 1970s. The bloodiness aside, the sleuthing is classic Poirot, who Ustinov plays with his own brand of eccentric, slightly egotistical genius. His more rotund body marks him as physically distinct from both Finney's on-screen portrayal and Christie's description of the character in her books, and he uses it to his advantage by physically dominating the screen in a way that often plays counter to his witty asides and constant exasperation with how the others insult him by assuming he is French ("Belgian! Belgian eavesdropper!" he corrects when called "a damned froggy eavesdropper").

The rest of the cast, which follows the then-popular Hollywood formula of mixing newer faces (Olivia Hussey, Jon Finch, Lois Chiles, Simon MacCorkindale) with stalwarts of classic Hollywood and British cinema (Bette Davis, David Niven, Angela Lansbury), has a grand time playing their characters to the hilt. Maggie Smith perfects pinched irritation in response to every ostentatious word that Bette Davis utters, while Mia Farrow molds an entire, unhinged performance around the hysterical, wide-eyed climax of Rosemary's Baby (1968). The real stand-out, though, is Angela Lansbury, who steals every scene she's in with her blurry, slurring erudition and boozy-comical inappropriateness. Less funny, however, is the dated, subservient Indian stereotype played by I.S. Johar as Mr. Choudhry, the ship's overeager, buffoonish manager (who is unnamed in the novel). Of course, many of Christie's novels were riddled with racist stereotypes and outright contempt for non-Western, non-white characters, so it is not particularly surprising that elements of that persisted in a late-'70s film version, although it is still disappointing. Nevertheless, the mystery is engaging enough and the banter consistently clever enough to carry the film along, even if it arguably didn't need 140 minutes to arrive at its conclusion.

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