olivia hussey

Death on the Nile (1978)

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I really, really wanted to love Death on the Nile. I first acquired a copy of it shortly after the death of the late Angela Lansbury, my love for whom is widely advertised all over this site. Unfortunately, her role in this is one of the smaller ones from among the ensemble, and the overall tone and extended length of this one was a bit of a letdown. It’s not bad; I quite enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it. 

As the film opens, we meet Jackie de Bellefort (Mia Farrow), who practically begs her heiress friend Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles) to hire Jackie’s fiance Simon (Simon MacCorkindale) for a position at Ridgeway’s estate. She relents, and then we jump forward a year to find Simon on a honeymoon with his wife, except he hasn’t married Jackie, and is instead now wedded to Linnet. That doesn’t stop Jackie from being a thorn in their side, however, as she shows up at their most recent romantic rendezvous atop a Giza pyramid to recite facts about its dimensions, with Linnet and Simon both expressing frustration that she has appeared at every destination on their post-wedding trip. (As a side note, I loved this; if my best friend stole my betrothed, I would also be so petty that neither of them would know a moment’s peace for the rest of their lives, and there would be no corner of the earth in which I could not find a way to be a nuisance.) They attempt to give her the slip before the next leg of their trip, and appear to have been successful, as they board a steamboat travelling down, as the title would suggest, the Nile River. 

As it turns out, not only are they not alone on this journey, but many of the passengers, like Jackie, are in the vicinity because of their desire to cause trouble for the newlyweds. There’s Linnet’s maidservant, Louise (Jane Birkin), who was promised a dowry for her service to Linnet so that she could marry a man she loves, but which Linnet continues to delay paying, possibly with the intention of completely reneging on their deal. Miss Bowers (Maggie Smith)’s formerly noble family lost their fortune at the machinations of Linnet’s father, forcing her into taking a thankless job as the companion of Marie Van Schuyler (Bette Davis), whose own aristocratic status does not stop her from having kleptomaniacal inclinations, especially with regards to Linnet’s pearls. Linnet has also publicly denounced the practices of Dr. Bessner (Jack Warden), as her friend died under his “care,” which includes treating patients with intravenous armadillo urine, and his career is in the balance. Then there’s Andrew Pennington (George Kennedy), who manages Linnet’s stateside business and who is set on preventing her from finding out that he’s been skimming, while Colonel Race (David Niven) is there surreptitiously acting on behalf of her English lawyers, who want to bring this to her attention. Nebulously, there is a young communist aboard named James (Jon Finch), who bears hatred for Linnet as a representative of class striation, and, last but not least, the ship is also carrying Salome Otterbourne (Lansbury) and her daughter Rosalie (Olivia Hussey); Salome is a romance novelist currently embroiled in a libel lawsuit over one of her recent books, which was partially based on Linnet’s real life and may have insufficiently differentiated the main character from the inspiration. And, of course, Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) is there, because someone has to use their little grey cells to figure out who did it when Linnet turns up dead, and the only ironclad alibi is Jackie’s. 

The oddest thing about this adaptation is that it decides to play the story for light comedy; that’s not that strange in and of itself (yours truly was in a Christie parody entitled And Then There Was One in high school—it’s a common way to present her work), but it’s curious how intermittently the comedy works. Where this least was least successful was when the humor went very broad, most notably in regards to Lansbury’s perpetually intoxicated (and horned up) Salome, who is possibly the most obnoxious character in the whole thing. You know that if I’m looking at Lady Angela and having a bad time, then we’re really in trouble. Shortly before a failed attempt on Linnet’s life at the Temple of Karnak, we’re treated to a scene of all of the passengers disembarking the ship and setting out to ride up to the site; I suppose we’re supposed to laugh at the sight gag of George Kennedy struggling to mount a donkey while the others get on camels, but it certainly failed to get a mirthless smile out of me, let alone a chuckle. There’s also an overlong gag when the group first boards the ship and I. S. Johar’s captain character does an extended bit about trying to guess which guest is which, and I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s possibly racist and at the very least undignified. On the other hand, the biggest laugh I did get was from one of Lansbury’s scenes, in which Salome is recounting how she managed to witness the killer flee from the stateroom, her voiceover explaining that a deckhand was showing her something on the shore, while the flashback itself reveals her buying several large liquor bottles from the man instead. At least I can say that the film got funnier for me as it went along, with more of the jokes landing in the back half than in the front. 

On a purely visual level, the film is much more notable. As a period piece, all of the clothing is gorgeous; the only Academy Award for which it was nominated was Best Costume Design, and it won that Oscar as well as the BAFTA in the same category. Special attention should be drawn to Smith’s outfitting as Miss Bowers. Throughout the film, she’s consistently dressed in tightly tailored men’s tuxedos and other formalwear, and she looks great in every one of them. Her silhouette is stunning, and she works the slightly transgressive look quite well. I was also struck by the various gowns in which Farrow is costumed. When most people think about her, I assume that they all have the same first mental image that I do, which is of her emaciated, shaven-headed prisoner in a nightgown in Rosemary’s Baby. Everything else I’ve ever seen her in was during (or after) her marriage to Woody Allen, during which time she was, to put it lightly, not doing well. I don’t think that I ever realized before that she’s a beautiful woman, and getting to see her slink about in dresses that won costuming awards on both sides of the Atlantic was a thrill. I loved her angry, vengeful energy, and she ended up being one of the movie’s highlights. 

This is somewhat condensed from the 1937 novel on which it was based, as usually must be done when making a Christie adaptation. Characters are removed, motives are swapped around or condensed, and you’re still likely to end up creating something that’s over two hours long, with this particular film clocking in at 134 minutes (Kenneth Branagh’s 2022 version was 127 minutes long, and I can’t imagine how the David Suchet adaptation manages to get the plot resolved in 97 minutes). That’s a decent time for a good mystery, but it errs quite long for a comedy, so it ends up succeeding more as one than the other. It’s not bad, but it almost feels like it would work better broken up into two parts for Masterpiece Theatre. And, frankly, I didn’t enjoy seeing Angela Lansbury take a bullet during these trying times. Embark (or don’t) with that in mind. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Black Christmas (1974)

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When discussing films that established the standard structure & tropes of the slasher genre, Black Christmas is the one that most often slips through the cracks. Arriving more than a decade after proto-slashers like Psycho & Peeping Tom and just a few years before full-blown American slashers like Halloween & Friday the 13th, the Canuxploitation classic is somewhat of an island as a genre pioneer, disconnected from the movement that followed in its wake. That’s not for lack of cultural clout or stylistic specificity either. If nothing else, the cast of Black Christmas is incredibly stacked for a low-budget horror movie, especially considering Margot Kidder & Olivia Hussey’s central roles as sorority-girl victims. The film is also significant as an early adaptation of the “The call is coming from inside the house!” babysitter-murder urban legend, which would prove to be a significant influence on the genre. All the standard tropes & techniques of the typical slasher are already present too, especially in the first person POV shots of the killer stalking his sexually active teen-girl victims. Black Christmas is as much of a foundational text of the slasher’s DNA as any other that you can cite, yet its status is considered more “cult classic” than household name.

Because this is a genre template that’s since been set in stone, there isn’t going to be much in Black Christmas’s basic premise that surprises anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two since the 1980s. A mysterious killer makes threatening phone calls to a sorority house & methodically offs a series of victims therein. The killer’s identity remains hidden and we often see victims through his weaponized gaze while heavy breathing overpowers the soundtrack. Like with most genre films, Black Christmas’s premise is only interesting in where it deviates from the norm. The Christmastime setting might have been repeated in subsequent slasher franchises like Santa’s Slay & Silent Night Deadly Night, but I’m sure it was a novelty at the time. Black Christmas also deviates from what would eventually become the traditional slasher by resisting devolving into a bodycount film, spending most of its runtime investigating the murder of one sorority house victim instead of letting the corpses pile. Our de facto Final Girl protagonist (Hussey, laying on her posh British accent as thickly as possible) is also far from the naïve virginal cliché that would soon become standard; she spends most of the film refusing to be swayed from her decision to have an abortion. She also cedes a lot of screentime to Kidder’s mean-drunk sorority sister, who would normally be a two-scene archetypal annoyance before being killed off. In as many ways as Black Christmas resembles a typical slasher, it’s also freer than most to defy that genre’s conventions, since they had not yet been fully established.

As interesting as the film’s cultural context might be as an early pioneer of its genre, Black Christmas is just as notable for its in-the-moment effect. The urban legend of the murdered babysitter that ends in the punchline “The calls are coming from inside the house!” may seem too overly familiar to scare horror audiences without subversion or embellishment, but its in-the-moment tension is still horrifically unnerving as told here. The lewd phone calls the college-girl victims receive in Black Christmas are grotesquely unnerving. The killer gargles, shrieks, and moans in sexually explicit menace over the phone while the girls cower in disgust around the receiver. The effect is anguished & inhuman, an unholy assault of aural discomfort. The kills, although infrequent, have an unseemly nastiness to them as well. The killer has no known motivation or weakness, like a Michael Myers prototype. He strangles victims with dry-cleaning bags & phone cords with a cold, uncaring brutality, leaving corpses to rot without purpose or emotion. He hides in closets, attics, and basements – the exact nightmare environments that are relatable enough to feel genuinely threatening but are also oddly otherworldly. The film’s camera work is also off-puttingly crass, stumbling through the sorority house in search of victims as if it were in a blind drunken rage. Its unconformable angles & up-close split diopter framing are nearly as unnerving as the lewd phone calls from the killer – a high bar to clear.

It’s difficult to make sense of Black Christmas’s place in the cultural zeitgeist. Horror nerds hold it in high regard as a foundational text for the slasher genre, but it’s unclear whether that status has amounted to wider recognition & respect. Director Bob Clark’s larger catalog is no help, as attempting to make sense of any career that includes this film, A Christmas Story, Baby Geniuses, and Porky’s only results in pulling out your own hair. Regardless of its larger cultural context, however, Black Christmas remains perfectly potent as an isolated work. The kills are brutal, the soundtrack & camera work even moreso. The characters are more complex than what we’ve been conditioned to expect in this low-budget end of genre fare, resulting in more than just a skyrocketing bodycount. The drive-in era tagline warns “If this picture doesn’t make your skin crawl . . . t’s on TOO TIGHT,” and it’s one of the few films that lives up to that kind of carnival-barker grandstanding. You could likely find a better example of an early slasher pic that colors within the lines set by its genre and there are certainly ones that are more willing to exploit the novelty of their Yuletide setting. There’s just very little chance they’ll offer anything as eerie or as unnerving as a single phone call made in this proto-slasher gem.

-Brandon Ledet