This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Just. It's hard to agree with everyone calling it a "masterpiece", even rating it 9 or 10 stars. I rate this movie based on only the movie. Not having read the book, nor watched many of the other movies inspired by Agatha Christies books.So. Short review: Jackie is crazy (and has no eyebrows). Her guy is a douche. The victim is boring. Poirot is kinda sassy and gives no f#!ks. Snake guy professionally disposes of the snake (no doubt). I wouldn't really want to watch the whole thing again. The first... Hour? Is incredibly boring and honestly, focusing so much time on these characters made it painfully obvious who was going to die and pretty much gave away the killers. The welcome and "fun" surprises were the additional murders, and getting to know the (all of them) very weird and eccentric characters. Basically, the movie was fun after they finally get on the boat.Still, a mystery movie that is not really a mystery. Everyone testifying "He couldn't have done it! Neither could she!" doesn't make it true. It just makes these people stupid. Still, 6/10 for crazy people, snake-throwing and lots of sudden deaths.

A later super-popular Agatha Christie adaptation, Death on the Nile (1978), hails from that wonderful period when multi-star movies were all the rage, both with producers and movie-goers. This one assembles a really outstanding cast, including Peter Ustinov and David Niven as the detectives, and the richly rewarding Mia Farrow, plus Angela Lansbury, Bette Davis, George Kennedy, Maggie Smith, Jack Warden, Lois Chiles, etc, as the potential victims. No-one seems to have noticed that Miss Christie uses exactly the same plot device (admittedly with a cleverly convincing variation) that she employed in "And Then There Were None". Not that these quibbles matter very much when we moviegoers are treated to this opulently-filmed-on-location exercise in high-budget entertainment. The Anchor Bay DVD rates 10/10 with me. And it also carries some admirable extras.

After the success of "Murder on the Orient Express" its producers decided to continue reveling in Agatha Christie. They thought they found the formula: a cast studded with international stars playing a clump of potential murderers in a cramped but exotic locale. In "Murder on the Orient Express" it was a train. Here, it is a paddlewheeler cruising the Nile (what else?) As with "Orient Express" the cast is truly amazing. Albert Finny, unable or unwilling to reprise his Poirot, was transformed into Peter Ustinov. Ustinov bears no resemblance to the Poirot described by Christie; but while his Poirot is more clownish and idiosyncratic, Ustinov was a big name star at the time.For the rest of the cast, the always welcome David Niven checks in as Christie's Col. Race, brightening an otherwise thankless role as Poirot's assistant.The big casting coup (as with Lauren Bacall in "Orient Express") was motion picture grand dame Bette Davis; once a great star, in the years before "Nile" she was often relegated to horror movies. Joining Davis were Angela Lansbury, "Airport" veteran George Kennedy, Maggie Smith, Jack Warden, Harry Andrews, Bond girl Lois Chiles, Mia Farrow and the ethereally beautiful Olivia Hussey.But "Nile" has several things working against it.First, in "Orient Express" the murder victim was himself a vicious kidnapper/murderer (his story is based on the Lindbergh kidnapping case) so the sympathy was all with the murderer(s). In this case the murder is more tragic, which gives the story a less gay tone.Then, too, Paul Dehn, the script writer who gave "Orient Express" its wit and sparkle, condensing the book without losing Christie, was dead before "Nile." His replacement, Anthony Shaffer ("Sleuth") was more coarse in language and intent and seems unhappy with the confines of the original tale (in fact, his more delightful script for "Evil Under the Sun" a few years later was, for all intents and purposes, an original story).Whether due to Ustinov's radically unique Poirot, the glumness of the story, or the slightly tarnished cast, "Nile" did not do the business of "Orient Express" which, whatever its artistic triumphs, is ultimately more important in the movie business."Murder on the Orient Express" preceded "Star Wars" by a few years and the movies were still the movies as they had been since the silents: with glamor, charm and classy stars winning out. This is especially true in 1974, after the 1960s and early 70smovies went through a period of grittiness and experimentation that rubbed some people's fur the wrong way. Paul Dehn's "Orient Express" script was free from the sex and bad language and gave star turns to all its big names. "Orient Express" was murderous fun for the whole family."Murder on the Orient Express" also came at a time when all-star attractions were the rage. "The Towering Inferno" and "Earthquake" were released the same year as "Orient Express"; on the other hand, the last and least of the big-name disaster movies, "The Swarm," came out the same year as "Nile." Movies featuring big stars in little boxes on their posters were falling out of favor. "Star Wars" (1977) and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1978) were driving the last nails into the coffin of the glitz and glamour of old the Hollywood "Orient Express" and "Nile" tried to lovingly recapture.Though outwardly exotically similar to "Orient Express," "Nile" lacks its predecessor's sense of fun in its more unpleasant tale, where the murder is not justice or rightful retribution but simply a tawdry story in a handsome set of clothes.The most unbelievable thing about "Nile" is that Ustinov's flamboyantly un-Christie Poirot would reappear five more times, once in the movies (the delightful but unfaithful "Evil Under the Sun") and four more times on television reductions.The best things about "Nile": David Niven, the tango scene, the beauties of Egypt.

It is understandable that so many reviewers want to compare this film to its predecessor, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, and they are right to do so. But for all intents and purposes, these are the only two films that most of them bother with, almost as if no other ones bear comparison. In this assumption (either from not having seen these other Christie adaptations, or possibly even forgetting that they were adaptations from Christie), they do unintended damage to at least two other great Christie-based films. First, though, a short and personal comparison of NILE and ORIENT. They are both great films of their type, to many arguably the greatest, but I have always found NILE to be the better film as well as the better Christie mystery. Once a possible solution presents itself in ORIENT, it rather sneaks up on you before it does on Poirot. Whereas there are myriad story lines in NILE that would explain all of these characters' presence on a Nile cruise, it slowly dawns on the reader or viewer of ORIENT that no such variation of story lines exist to warrant all of the characters on the train being there at the same time - except one. Both are stupendously well-rendered adaptations, sumptuous in design, costuming, cinematography, musical background, etc., and brilliantly, incredibly cast down to the smallest role. Finney is the true physical embodiment of Christie's sleuth through some inspired (if occasionally hard-to-ignore) make-up, whereas it's hard to imagine any major actor looking less like Christie's creation than does Peter Ustinov. Since that fact is impossible to camouflage, that he succeeds so brilliantly in embodying Poirot is a veritable triumph of pure acting talent, versatility and charm over nature. I'd be happy with either actor in this role, but in the end it is Ustinov who "wears" better over time (as long as we can disregard the most perfect Poirot possible, David Suchet, from the long-running TV Poirot series). But what about those two other film triumphs? The first, made on a comparatively low budget but with some major acting talents (Louis Hayward, Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald, Judith Anderson, Roland Young, C. Aubrey Smith, etc.), was 1945's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, which I always thought was the greatest of all Christie film adaptations until Messrs. Lumet and Guillerman arrived in the 1970s. Directed by the great Rene Clair, it may still hold that distinction, but would probably not appeal to a mass audience today due to its lack of Technicolor grandeur and, yes, budgetary excess. And that fourth great Christie film adaptation was, of course, Billy Wilder's WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957), starring Charles Laughton (in a truly brilliant performance), Marlene Dietrich and Tyrone Power. (The sole problem with WITNESS is an added flashback - not in the original story or its theatrical adaptation - to the meeting and subsequent marriage of the Dietrich and Power characters, done not so much for exposition, I think, as to enlarge their roles to warrant their star billing in a film that is otherwise very much dominated by Charles Laughton's character from beginning to end.) What's interesting about these two older films is that both of them had to have their endings rewritten in order for them to conform with The Hollywood Production Code of the day, and in both instances, the endings (probably with input from Ms. Christie) were even better than in the original stories. And I can guarantee that nobody watching those older films for the first time had any real idea of what the denouement would be, this pretty much like NILE (which has the best denouement of them all), but somewhat unlike ORIENT (although in the latter, the ride the director takes us on is so enjoyable that we hardly care if we guess the ending before Poirot does!). One more thing, the musical score for AND THEN THERE WERE NONE is minuscule in comparison to the two films from the 1970s, but just as effective, as it was written by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a leading classical composer of that period, and its repetitive-but-understated nature seems to almost crawl into you as the film progresses. All in all, then, four wonderful Christie adaptations instead of two, all of them well worth watching every year or two (as I have been doing with AND THEN THERE WERE NONE for about 65 years now).