Evil Under the Sun

With Ustinov's energetic impersonation of Poirot and Anthony Shaffer's traditionally structured script, Death on the Nile offered a fair recreation of Agatha Christie's world, but this time Christie herself would rightly have disowned the film. It's not just that her novel's English coastal setting has been switched to an Adriatic island; for some reason, Shaffer and Hamilton have swopped the elegant English-style menace for a splurge of theatrical camp. The emphasis on gaudy costumes and bitchy back-biting is hideously amplified by a composite Cole Porter score, and it is only in the last section that Shaffer finally drops the double entendres and allows the golden-age-of-detection feel to reassert itself.