The last film outing of British crime writer Agatha Christie’s novel Death on the Nile was in 1978, when British actor Peter Ustinov, memorable as the Roman emperor Nero in the 1950s film Quo Vadis, led the cast with a fine performance as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

UK director John Guillermin turned in a well-made film version, with a notable performance from romantic lead Simon MacCorkindale as Simon Doyle and cameos from some of the best-known English or American actors and actresses of the time, many of them coaxing a few final sparks from long careers. Undemanding roles in material that very much relies upon ensemble acting allowed Bette Davis to appear as American millionaire Marie Van Schuyler and David Niven to play British military man Colonel Race.

There were also roles for then up-and-coming talents, such as US actress Mia Farrow as wronged fiancée Jacqueline de Bellefort and a youngish Maggie Smith, still going strong today in older roles, as put-upon ladies companion Miss Bowers.

Add to this Nino Rota’s inspired score and location shooting in Upper Egypt, and all the ingredients were in place for what for many became a favourite film. Together with director Sidney Lumet’s inspired film version of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express only four years earlier, this time with UK actor Albert Finney as Poirot and an equally remarkable cast, and it must have seemed to many that Christie’s own well-attested doubts as to how well her material transferred to film were misplaced.

However, such doubts may well return with the opening this month of British actor and director Kenneth Branagh’s new film version of Death on the Nile in the US and countries around the world including Egypt. Branagh tried his hand at a new film version of Murder on the Orient Express in 2017, and though it was panned by critics, it seems that the experience has nevertheless encouraged him to have another go with Death on the Nile.  

All the problems with the earlier film return in spades, including the painfully sharp visual quality that comes with the use of digital technology and lashings of often clumsily applied CGI. Christie’s novels, backward-looking even at the time when they were written owing to their unlikely casts of rentier characters, come out best in a kind of heritage soft focus as generations of directors have generally understood.

While Branagh seems also to understand this aspect of Christie’s appeal judging by his film’s painstaking 1930s styling, the period character of the material jars against the high-definition digital technology he employs. The overall impression is not so much of a film set in Egypt as one presenting a digital simulacrum of it owing to the wholesale use of special effects.

The sense of space and depth associated with real locations – so memorably captured in the 1978 film – are largely lost in favour of visual effects that would not look out of place in high-end computer games. The whole thing feels oddly studio-bound, with scenes done on shore, such as visits to ancient Egyptian monuments, giving the impression that they have been filmed against polystyrene and plaster mock-ups, contrasting oddly with the different visual quality of the digital effects.

For reasons best known to the film’s production team – perhaps expense, perhaps Covid-19 restrictions, or perhaps a kind of trigger-happy preference for CGI – the decision was made not to make the film in Egypt, meaning that the Pyramids, the Abu Simbel Temples, and the Nile itself are all rendered either technologically or through studio mock-ups. All this is bewildering since the demographic for which the film is presumably intended is not likely to be impressed with the kind of computer-generated visual effects mostly associated with science-fiction and action films.

Perhaps Branagh is aiming at attracting younger audiences more attuned to digital sharpness and visual bling, but one wonders how far they will be seduced by Christie’s plot, even, as in this case, when it has been digitally inflated but otherwise slimmed down. The film makes various unaccountable departures from the original novel, with the omission of important characters and the introduction of others along with additional material that adds nothing to the psychology of the characters or the development of the plot.

Branagh may have cooked up something that is neither fish nor fowl in his new film version, underlined by a tin-eared script that lurches between fidelity to the upper-class English speech of the time, one of Christie’s specialities, and things that characters in a Christie novel could never say. Overall, he has served up a film that is likely to disappoint Christie fans and fans in particular of Death on the Nile.

AGATHA IN EGYPT

The fact that Branagh chose not to make his film in Egypt is a particular disappointment since Christie herself was an occasional and always appreciative visitor to the country.

Her first visit took place before World War I when as the daughter of a wealthy upper-middle class family she spent three months attending balls and polo matches from a base at Cairo’s Gezirah Palace Hotel, now the Cairo Marriott. However, it was her second visit, in 1933, that left its mark on posterity. Christie, accompanied by her second husband the archaeologist Max Mallowan, took a river cruise up the Nile, and it was recollections of this that informed her 1936 novel Death on the Nile.

The novel is vintage Christie in its exploration of the murderous passions that can arise in a claustrophobic set of circumstances, in this case among the passengers on a river boat as it cruises up river. Fortunately, Poirot, also a passenger, is on hand to unpick a tangle of deliberately engineered false clues in order finally to unmask the murderers.

“You were too clever for us, Mr Poirot,” one of them says. Money and marriage, as so often in Christie’s plots, turn out to have been at the bottom of things, with these giving rise to a convoluted series of events deliberately designed to mystify. As one of the murderers confesses to Poirot, “it seemed to me that the basis of the idea ought to be a kind of two-handed alibi. You know – if [we] could somehow or other give evidence against each other – but actually if that evidence would clear us of everything.”

Christie only wrote one novel set in modern Egypt, and though the focus is on her European and American characters, she records how the country might have looked to well-heeled tourists at the time. From their base in Aswan, for example, her characters are able to plan a trip up the Nile to the Abu Simbel Temples, impossible today because of the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s and the moving of the temples to higher ground.

(Guillermin got around this difficulty by setting his film in Luxor and re-imagining the moment when a boulder falls perilously close to Simon and Linnet Doyle as they are inspecting details of the temples – was it an accident or was it pushed? – as taking place in the Karnak Temple instead. Branagh, who has recreated the Abu Simbel Temple in the studio, restores the scene to its original location.)  

Christie’s other novel set in Egypt, Death Comes as the End, is unusually set in the ancient period, but it was by no means her only foray into the wider region. Following an unsuccessful first marriage to Archie Christie, whose name she kept after divorce and subsequent remarriage, she became interested in the ancient civilisations of the Middle East through her second husband, for periods helping out on archaeological digs in Syria and Iraq.

Some of that experience fed into other books with Middle Eastern settings, among them Murder on the Orient Express, also first published in the 1930s. The setting of this novel is on a train rather than a cruise ship, with Poirot beginning his journey in Aleppo in northern Syria, travelling on to Istanbul, and then from Istanbul to Europe. A murder takes place on the train while it is stranded in a snowstorm in the Balkans, with the murderers once again engineering a convoluted series of false clues designed to mislead the detective.

Then there is Murder in Mesopotamia, also from the 1930s, in which the wife of an archaeologist working on an archaeological dig in Iraq is murdered, and Appointment with Death, set in Palestine and Jordan and from the end of the same decade, in which a woman is mysteriously found dead at the Petra archaeological site. There is They Came to Baghdad, unusually for Christie a spy novel rather than a detective story, in which a young woman discovers a dying British secret agent in her hotel room as a summit meeting is to be held in Baghdad.

Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine no longer much resembled the countries Christie had first visited or lived in the 1930s after World War II, with rapid social change and political revolution sweeping across the region during a tumultuous post-War decade. She thus returned to the Middle East mostly in her memoirs, where she described the experiences she had earlier shared with Mallowan in his work in the region.

Come Tell Me How You Live, written while Christie was in London during World War II, looks back on her life in Syria in the 1930s when Mallowan was working on archaeological digs at Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak. A later full-length Autobiography published posthumously in 1977 gives further details of Christie’s life in the region.

Following his appointment as a professor of archaeology in London, he and Christie set out for Iraq where he was excavating the ancient Assyrian site of Nimrud in northern Iraq, first excavated by the British archaeologist Henry Layard in the mid-19th century. According to British writer Janet Morgan, Christie’s authorised biographer in the decade that followed, there was “the creation of at least one annual detective story, sometimes accompanied by a novel, a play, a collection of short stories, and a yearly expedition to Iraq.”

Successful novels such as A Murder is Announced, They Do It with Mirrors, and A Pocket Full of Rye were written this way, as was Death on the Nile. As Morgan says in her biography, Christie wrote her books in spare moments among her other activities in the Middle East. “Writing was not the most important aspect of her life; she drafted her books, as she had always done, in interludes between other activities,” she says.

Given Christie’s long involvement with Egypt and the wider region, it seems a pity that this has not yet been more satisfactorily reflected in film adaptations of her Middle Eastern novels. While Branagh has chosen not to follow Christie to Egypt for his version of Death on the Nile, this should not constrain future directors wanting to supply more authentic images of Egypt’s magnificent landscapes.

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*A version of this article appears in print in the 17 February, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.