It's the Top, It's a Damn Fine Christie: Evil under the Sun (1982)

You're the top!

You're another Christie

You're the top!

You're that Ackroyd mystery

You're a solution from a Belgian named Poirot

You're a locked room murder at a mansion covered in snow

You're a Marple parallel

You're a poisoned caramel

You're Tuppence and Tommy

You're the King Tut mummy

You're the Gioconda Smile

I'm a forged check, a plotting wreck, a flop

But if, baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top!

--apologies to Cole Porter 

I think 1982 inaugurated the full-fledged era of what we might term the "arch deco" Agatha Christie mystery, with the release of the first film adaptation of the Queen of Crime's 1941 Hercule Poirot mystery novel Evil under the Sun, complete with a soundtrack of orchestrated Cole Porter tunes. This age lasted but a short time on film, crashing and burning with Appointment with Death in 1988, but it enjoyed life on television with the early Poirot series starring David Suchet, which in its first incarnation ran a dozen years, from 1989 until 2001.  The series famously got "darker" in the years from 2003 through 2013, but in its earlier period was characterized mostly by a light, witty approach to Christie's mysteries, faithful to the blither spirit of much of Christie oeuvre and certainly that of the 1982 Evil under the Sun film.  

Evil under the Sun was the third of what can be seen as the Poirot cinematic quartet: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Evil under the Sun and Appointment with Death.  The Seventies Poirots, Express and Nile, both had bright moments (indeed, some have deemed the ending of the former film far too patly cheerful), yet there was definitely darkness to the characters and the situations. With 1982's Evil under the Sun, darkness is dispensed with, barring one brief flashback murder sequence.  Murder in the film is bawdy, bitchy, glittering and gay, in both senses of the latter word.  

This could be a controversial assessment but I actually liked the film better than the book.  The book's characters, I felt when rereading it recently, were not especially engaging cardboard types, more interesting as plot devices than intrinsically as people.  As I discussed in my review of the novel, there's the garrulous America matron, the religious fanatic minister, the unhappy career woman, the boorish Indian army major, the mannish spinster, etc.  

Scripter Anthony Shaffer, author of the hit play (later filmed) Sleuth, deleted, merged and altered characters to come up with a fizzier concoction and crafted some sparkling amusing dialogue that is not, it must be allowed, always to be found in Christie's actual text.  He also made considerable, though not impermissibly drastic in my view, changes to the plot (see below).  Yet the whole product still felt faithful (if a bit naughtier) to the lighter side of Christie--the side that was, you know, actually fun.  It's a spirit that runs greatly counter to the ethos of modern crime fiction films, which tend to make all things bleak and bitter.  

The film concerns the strangling of man-crazy musical revue actress Arlena Marshall (Diana Rigg) while she was sunning herself on an isolated beach on a privately owned island in the Adriatic off the coast of fictional "Tyrania." (Albania?)  Arlena had been staying, along with her husband Kenneth Marshall (Denis Quilley) and stepdaughter Linda (Emily Hone), at the hotel on the island owned by Daphne Castle (Maggie Smith), a former chorus girl colleague of Arlena's from the old days.  Daphne was given the island for "services rendered" by her then boyfriend, none other than the King of Tyrania, when he married the current queen.  

Patrick Redfern (Nicholas Clay) keeps an eye open for Arlena 

Arlena Maxwell (Diana Rigg) eyes the Gardeners' script 

Odell Gardener (James Mason) selects one of the jewel like cocktails

Arlena takes a drink as Rex Brewster (Roddy McDowall) looks on
Surprisingly only words are poisoned in this film.

Poirot (Peter Ustinov) selects a jewel like canape

Daphne Castle (Maggie Smith) passes round the plate.

What, no creme de banane?!

"Have a sausage, Arlena!"

The additional guests staying at the exclusive hotel at the time of the murder are: 

1. Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), the great Belgian sleuthhound, on a case (see below)

2.-3. A pair of American show producers, Myra and Odell Gardener (Sylvia Miles and James Mason), desperate to get Arlena in their next play (she already bailed from their previous one, much to their resentment and financial loss)

4. Flaming gay LA gossip columnist Rex Brewster (Roddy McDowell), who has written a spicy celebrity biography of Arlena, full of details about herself that it seems that Arlena doesn't want known (like just how many men she slept with on her way up and when she was actually born, which was at the turn of the century)

5-6. A young couple by the name of Redfern, the devastatingly dapper and handsome Patrick (Nicholas Clay) and his wan wallflower wife Christine (Jane Birkin).  

Another guest, Sir Horace Blatt (Colin Blakely), shows up in his yacht on the day of the murder, but this makes me realize I need to back track a bit....

Early in the film Poirot descends upon the office of a London insurance company,
for whom he has been conducting an important investigation.
The secretary (Barbara Hicks) obviously deems him a lewd Frenchman.
The late Barbara Hicks had both a tiny part in this film and an even
tinier part in Death in the Nile, but somehow you remember her.  
You may remember her as well from the films Howard's End and Brazil.

The film actually opens with a brief scene detailing the discovery of a murdered woman on the Yorkshire moors in England, then segues to Hercule Poirot visiting a London insurance company.  After telling the insurance executive his company will have to settle the matter he investigated ("like it and lump it"), Poirot is informed that the company has another case for him.  

This one concerns an ostensibly expensive (L100,000!--over seven million pounds today) diamond brooch owned by bigwig self-made millionaire Sir Horace Blatt, which Blatt tried to insure with the company, though the brooch proved merely to be paste.  

Poirot goes to meet with Blatt aboard the millionaire's yacht off the French Riviera, where he learns that Blatt had given the brooch to Arlena (then Arlena Stuart) when he thought they were going to be married.  However, he demanded it back from her after he discovered that she gotten involved with some other man.  Arlena complied, seemingly, but what she returned to him was actually this bogus paste piece.  Blatt tasks Poirot with confronting Arlena about the diamond at Daphne Castle's hotel  in the Adriatic Sea; Blatt soon will follow him.  

Thus in the film Poirot actually has a business reason for being at the scene of the crime--though does any of this actually tie up with the murder?  Viewers of the film will see for themselves.  

prickly Sir Horace Blatt on board his yacht with his pasty diamond

Sir Horace arrives at the hotel (see his yacht offshore), just in time for the murder.

Meanwhile, man mad Arlena appears scandalously to have been having it off with handsome Patrick, to the consternation of his own wife, not to mention Arlena's husband Kenneth and stepdaughter Linda and Daphne Castle herself, who besides despising Arlena anyway, pines after Kenneth and hates to see him treated this way.  Arlena apparently actually paid the way for Patrick and his wife at the hotel. 

Patrick is the one, in company with Myra Gardener, who discovers the bronzed body bathing on the secluded beach, but he seemingly has an airtight alibi for Arlena's murder--as does, it transpires, seemingly about everyone else on the island. (Like in the book, the servants don't seem to count--they're apparently below suspicion to use John Dickson Carr's term.)  

Patrick (Nicholas Clay) and Christine (Jane Birkin)
Love their contrasting body language.  

Patrick gives Arlena the eye while Christine takes another sip. 

Poirot investigates Arlena's murder at the behest of Daphne, who, desperate to avoid scandal at her exclusive hotel, reminds Poirot that it would be personally embarrassing for him, the great Belgian crime investigator, not to solve the case before the Tyranian police finally make it to the island.  Poirot does investigate and solves the case in pretty short order, despite the murder being one of those super ingenious clockwork jobs beloved in classic mystery.  

"People get so peculiar about a spot of murder."
Daphne urges Poirot to explore this murder matter.  

Sun Scripter Anthony Shaffer--who co-wrote a few mystery novels himself back in the Fifties with his twin brother Peter, author of the hit plays Equus and Amadeus--wrote the hit mystery thriller play Sleuth and worked on the scripts for all four of the films in the Poirot Quartet, although his work on the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Murder on the Orient Express went uncredited.  Shaffer received sole writing credit for the other three Poirot films.  

There's is humor in all of these Poirot films as well as a camp element that increasingly comes to the fore, fully flowering in Evil under the Sun.  In Death on the Nile it's strongly present in the codependent sniping between Mrs. Van Schuyler (Bette Davis) and her companion Bowers (Maggie Smith) and the drunken antics of wildly dressed erotic romance writer Salome Otterbourne (Angela Lansbury)--it's significant that the three actresses portraying these characters, one of whom happily is still with us, were all gay icons.  

The Gardeners, Carrie (Sylvia Miles) and Odell (James Mason)

In Sun camp is present in the catty backbiting between rival show queens Arlena and Daphne, presented with gusto by Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith, in the limp-wristed posturing of Roddy McDowell's impish flaming gay queen, Rex Brewster, and in the dazzlingly over-the-top costuming by Anthony Powell (who had won an Oscar four years earlier for his work in Death on the Nile), the latter of which which reaches its apogee in the glittering red, white, blue, green and yellow Wonder Bread apparel sported by Smith, Rigg and McDowell and the bold, heavily shoulder padded outfits of Sylvia Miles, who for all the world looks like she just stepped off the set of Drag Race.  

It's the Thirties as filtered through the Eighties. The only thing missing is a catfight between Joan Collins and Linda Evans.  Ah, the good old days of the soap opera catfights.  You bitch!, good girl Linda would cry before she tackles bad girl Joan and their grappling stunt doubles tumble down an incline and fall into a swimming pool, where the slapping and hair pulling splashily continues, as the two ladies go at it like brawling synchronized swimmers.  Arlena gets called a bitch several times in this film by other females, including her sulky young stepdaughter Linda, and to her husband she herself screeches at one point: "That bitch Daphne!"   

Clad in her Wonder Bread swimsuit, Arlena scopes out scantily clad, studly Patrick.

Fancy meeting you here!

"Scram, Linda!"

what you might call a pleasure excursion
Arlena later tells Daphne archly:
"Patrick insisted on rowing me right round the island and it's bigger than I thought. 
Poor thing, he's absolutely exhausted."

Anthony Powell's inspiration for some of the costumes in Evil under the Sun?

There's also a gay sensibility apparent in the constant objectification of poshly hunky Patrick Redfern, played by Nicholas Clay, who was best known for his portrayal of a luminescent Sir Lancelot (like something out of a pre-Raphaelite painting) in the much admired John Boorman film Excalibur and a studly Mellors in the steamy 1981 adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover.  (Sylvia Kristel of the notorious erotic French series of Emmanuelle films plays Lady Chatterley.) 

Nicholas Clay may not be a household name, but he does have his bedazzled and besotted fans.  Quoting from an Amazon review of Lady Chatterley's Lover: 

Connie winds up finding lust and love with the estate's gamekeeper, played brilliantly by the late Nicholas Clay....Clay was arguably one of the most exquisite men ever to grace the silver screen and reveals all to us in the movie.  (And I am so grateful he does because everything he has is shockingly gorgeous--I rented this movie and after seeing the first scene with him in it I think I cleared the couch in one leap to get to my PC to buy this movie from Amazon.)

Here Thirties Olympics swimmer and
Tarzan and Flash Gordon hunk 
Buster Crabbe wears trunks that look
ample compared to Clay's in
Evil under the Sun

In an era that greatly exploited female toplessness in films, Clay indeed bared his impressive bottom (and sometimes more) in at least three movies.  In Evil under the Sun much of his screen time he spends in a lovingly-photographed, brief black swimsuit that looks skimpier than such garb actually was in the Thirties. Or it just may be that the suit simply rides up Clay's ample posterior. (Cole Porter definitely would have deemed Clay "the bottom" in that sense.)

An admiring discussion of the film is included in the 2023 Paul Baker book Camp: The Story of the Attitude That Conquered the World: 

In 1982 Maggie Smith teamed up with another British camp icon, Diana Rigg, which is full of bitchy rivalry between the two.  

All of the women in the film look as if they've made their outfits out of discarded wrappers from a chocolate box.  They showcase a dazzling range of ridiculous turbans and outside sun hats, and Rigg is exceptionally catty to her teenage stepdaughter, Linda....

Roddy McDowall plays a flamboyant biographer in sailor drag, while strapping Nicholas Clay spends much of the film crammed into a tiny pair of black bathing trunks.  The proceedings are saturated in camp and feel like a pilot episode of RuPaul's Drag Race [Indeed!-TPT]....To top it all off, the murder hinges on whether someone will be wearing a bathing hat or not at a particular point in time.  

Go out to the rock, Patrick...

Even little Linda is fascinated with Patrick.  

Where did the gay sensibility that pervades this film come from exactly? Presumably the film's scripter, Anthony Shaffer, director, Guy Hamilton, who helmed some of the campiest James Bond films starring Roger Moore in the Seventies, and costume designer Anthony Powell were united in their vision--though as far as I know Hamilton and the much-married Anthony Shaffer were straight. Anthony's more famous twin brother, Peter, was gay, however, and I believe the two brothers were quite close.  

Anthony Shaffer was also an inveterate reader of classic crime fiction, including the works of John Dickson Carr, which anyone who has seen the play Sleuth or the film based on it would appreciate.  Like a lot of people, Shaffer sharply divided classic crime fiction between its country house British and American hard-boiled varieties.  Although this in fact is too simple a distinction, the playwright unapologetically embraced vintage British mystery as he envisioned it, in its more artificial, brightly stylized, gamelike guise. 

Another factor likely was openly gay screenwriter Barry Sandler, an uncredited contributor to the Sun script.  Sandler was co-credited on the similarly campy Miss Marple Christie adaptation The Mirror Crack'd (1980), as well as the pioneering mainstream gay content drama Making Love (1982), which I think featured the first real male-male sex (or at least foreplay) scene in an American film, and Crimes of Passion (1984), a perverse crime thriller co-starring Anthony Perkins from Psycho.  

In the brief early section of the film when Poirot is staying at a hotel on the French Riviera,
the camera pans across a beach path.  As a nursemaid follows her young charge on the path, 
a man in a black swimsuit suddenly dashes down the beach to the water.  Pretty sure this our 
introduction to Patrick Redfern.  (He and Christine are staying at the same hotel as Poirot.)

Beach Bum: Patrick Redfern looks for Arlena.
This is a favored shot by many fans of the film, judging from blog reviews.
Don't assk me, butt there must be some reason behind it.

So in summation if you like campy gay Cole Porter-Noel Coward humor in your films, Evil under the Sun is simply the cat's meow and the bee's knees.  I've seen comments to the effect that the cast of Sun lacks the star power of the previous Poirot films, but while it's fun to stargaze, the most important thing is whether the cast, stars or not, gives good performances--and this cast certainly does.  

Peter Ustinov's Poirot is funny and charming, like Ustinov himself.  Many admirers of David Suchet, admittedly the most perfect physical incarnation of Poirot, express disdain for Ustinov, but I like both actors in the role.  Ustinov, a two time acting Oscar winner, to me seems to capture both Poirot's overweening vanity and his "Papa Poirot" empathy with troubled females, just like Suchet.  

Poirot sees the light.

Some of the celebrities signed into this register.  Yes, there's a clue here!

Poirot in his monogrammed swimsuit, cut just a bit fuller than Patrick's.

Poirot gives Arlena a push (like other characters would like to do--off an island cliff)

"The Arlena Stuarts of the world do not count; their domination is of the moment."
Papa Poirot consoles the downcast Christine.  The line is very close to the book.

Linda proves a difficult witness.

Poirot enjoys a creme de menthe and a smoke as Arlena belts out a tune

Denis Quilley and Horace Blakely were English actors who were hardly household names in the states, but they were very good players.  Both men had appeared as suspects in Murder in the Orient Express, where they gave their usual strong performances.  Blakely played the troubled boy's troubled father in the film version of Peter Shaffer's Equus and Dr. Watson in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.  His Horace Blatt is fun outsize character, a self-consciously self-made man used to having his own way.  

Denis Quilley was more of a stage star (he starred in British revivals of La Cage aux Folles and  Sweeney Todd), but I notice he also was in a 1959 British television adaptation of Margery Allingham's Dancers in Mourning.  Wonder whether a copy of that's still around?  Quilley had also recently played a drag queen (quite convincingly) in the play and film Privates on Parade, the latter of which opened not long before Sun.  Admittedly, Kenneth, his character in Sun, while important, recedes in the bright light of the other actors camping it up, being, seemingly, simply a nice, normal guy, if somewhat susceptible to designing females.  

Not one of Arlena fans: Linda (Emily Hone) looks on, sulkily

Kenneth's daughter Linda, who hates her stepmother Arlena (for good reason), is played by child actress Emily Hone, who did one other film and then disappeared.  It's a pretty one-note performance as called for by the script (sulky) although she's not bad at it.  Christie devoted more time to this character in the book and attempted to make her more sympathetic.  

Here Linda, something less than the books sixteen in age, dislikes even Poirot, sneering at the little magic hankie act he performs her, and she develops an amusing sort of enmity with the equally childish Rex Brewster.  When Rex loftily asks the rude girl whether her parents ever told her that "peevishness is unbecoming in young ladies," Linda replies that they told her not to talk to "very strange men."

Enter Arlena, bitching vociferously about the bumpy car ride.

Kenneth enjoys a moment playing Cole Porter tunes with his daughter.

Then Arlena horns in, shooing away Linda before belting out "You're the Top."  

Linda tells that "very strange man" Rex Brewster to piss off, more or less.

Diana Rigg is terrific as bitchy, egocentric, man chasing Arlena.  She gave an interesting interview about the film where she expressed the view that Arlena, pushing forty, felt she was getting past it and was unhappy that she had never really made it as big in the business as she wanted.  So she bailed out of show business to marry a rich, pliable man while enjoying--being addicted to the attentions of young handsome men--flirtations and liasons on the side.  

Arlena and Hercule make bold
fashion statements

I had to wonder whether some of this (not the last part) was somewhat reflective of the actress herself.  Diana Rigg was herself 43 and must have realized that, despite her iconic beauty and great thespianic ability, she was still best known for having played droll, sexy Sixties fashion icon Mrs. Peel on the beloved TV series The Avengers back when she was in her twenties.  Around the same time she had been a Bond girl in that James Bond film that starred the guy who wasn't Sean Connery or Roger Moore.

Although she stated flatly that Arlena was a bitch, Rigg still seemed to have some empathy with her character, which actually fits in with the way Christie ultimately portrayed her in the book--or at least had Poirot, the great intuiter, tell us how she really was.  

The filmmakers knew not to waste a good thing with Rigg and Arlena survives in the film for about half its length, managing to throw off some funny lines and a spectacular rendition of "You're the Top," deliberately over-the-top and sabotaged by Maggie Smith's Daphne.  

In the book Arlena is dispatched only a third of the way into the novel and never actually does anything much.  In the film she makes more of an impression, due to her scripting and Rigg's performance, but she is never sympathetic, except in a flashback sequence of her murder, which I will talk about later below in the spoilers section.  

Can you feel the love tonight?

Roddy McDowall's gay gossip columnist Rex Brewster is similarly bitchy, but more ingenuously so.  According to McDowall in an interview Rex's bitchiness was unconscious: he's just nosy and would say things that were, well, rather direct and indelicate.  I've known people like that and I think he captured that personality well--and quite amusingly.  

In real life the gay McDowall, who died from cancer in 1998, remained closeted and intensely private all his life, though his homosexuality was an open secret in Hollywood. No gossip columnist ever outed him, even after the 1986 death from AIDS of his friend Rock Hudson (who starred in The Mirror Crack'd a couple of years earlier) made outing gay men a tabloid sport. His characters were often ambiguous in their sexuality, but I don't know that he ever played another character so flamingly gay as Rex Brewster. 

putting on the swish

Poirot questions Rex as he writes the revised ending for his biography of Arlena,
which now ends with her unsolved murder.  Does Rex know whodunit?  

Murder investigations are so wearisome, darlings.  

Rex has another spat with Linda.

Rex in his paddleboat.  Roddy was actually pretty toned.

McDowall's character doesn't exactly exist in the book, though he has some of the function of mannish spinster Emily Brewster, a completely forgettable book character deleted from the film.  The script also excised the book characters of Reverend Stephen Lane and Major Burnaby, neither of whom is a big loss in my opinion.  For Rex's murder motive Anthony Shaffer shamelessly purloins the Salome Otterbourne book motive from Death on the Nile.  There Linnet Ridgeway was suing Salome for libel over a book she wrote; here, Arlena won't give Rex a release for his biographer of her and he's already spent the advance.  

Twice Oscar nominated actress Sylvia Miles parading about in her outrageous outfits, braying loudly like a barnyard mule, is a lot of fun.  As her recessive husband, three time Oscar nominated actor James Mason has trouble getting a word in, but Shaffer did write him this lovely little speech to Poirot about the conventions of classic mystery fiction, something which is pure Shaffer, who in his playwriting always got all meta about mystery conventions.  Mason obviously relished the scene and delivers the speech with gusto.  He was a superb actor, who contributed significantly to the mystery film genre, even if he didn't think much of it.  

In his interview about the film, Mason sounds quite dismissive of mystery fiction as art, sadly, but he admits that when he would tell people he was in a Christie film, their eyes would light up and they would want to know all about it.  That was Christie in those days: looked down upon by the highbrows, beloved by the regular folk.  

Ready for her closeup, Mr. Hamilton.
Sylvia Miles as the opinionated Carrie Gardener.

James Mason as Odell Gardner.  It's a pretty minor part for someone of his stature,
but he gets this one great scene where he has the balls to gloat to Poirot
that he has no alibi for Arlena's murder.  

a beautifully shot scene 

This leaves Maggie Smith and Nicholas Clay and Jane Birkin, who have the most important roles in the film aside from Ustinov and Rigg.  In Maggie Smith's Daphne Castle, Shaffer merges two characters from the book: stylish dressmaker Rosamund Darnley and and bourgeois hotel proprietress Mrs. Castle.  I personally thought both of these characters were no loss.  Rosamund is this stereotypical unhappy (if brilliant) dress designer, very reminiscent of the character in Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds (so much so the character and her situation seems like blatant theft on Agatha's part).  Mrs. Castle is just a walking stereotype, a caricatured genteel landlady type--she says things like "playce" and  "nayce"--who contributes little if anything of interest.  

Maggie Smith's Daphne Castle on the other hand can toss off wisecracks (Forget cherchez la femme, it's "cherchez la fruit," she advises Poirot, pointing the finger of suspicion at her GBF Rex) while also being empathetic with mopy Linda, whom her stepmother sneeringly derides as a "cough drop" and is always ordering to "scram."  Dame Maggie really does have a marvelously expressive face in her "prime," don't you know.  She also functions amusingly as the closest thing the film has to a Watson for Poirot.  Her role as Bowers in Death on the Nile was fun, but she gets much more to do here.  She's been nominated for six Oscars, winning twice, and enjoyed a later life career resurgence with Harry Potter, Gosford Park and Downtown Abbey.

It's also great I think that Daphne is a woman with a past, as it were, who is still portrayed sympathetically.  Rosamund Darnley from the book has a "nice" country background, despite being in trade, which in Christie's handling makes her more virtuous, I suppose.  But so often virtue in fiction is boring, I'm afraid, and I find the book Kenneth and Rosamund rather boring indeed. (Film Kenneth still is.)  Daphne Castle is a much more transgressive character than Rosamund Darnley.  Good for Daph!  You can become a Balkan monarch's mistress and still have a happy ending, ladies!

consoling Linda about her wicked stepmother

about to deliver the film's most famous zinger with her "compliment" to Arlena:
"She could always throw her legs up in the air higher than any of us.  And wider."

Note Sir Horace's Hitler mustache.  He looks like he's ready to join the BUF.

appealing to Poirot's vanity

This leaves us with that seemingly mismatched young couple, Patrick and Christie Redfern.  Christine seems a drab, all pale and prone to wearing muted clothes, and she is much cast in the shade by her strutting peacock husband Patrick. You might be reminded of the plaintive French maid that Jane Birkin played back in Death in the Nile.  But in this film Birkin gets to do more with her character (see below).  The lovely actress and singer, whose roots go back to Swinging London (she could have been in a film version of Third Girl) died last year.  She was actually 35 when Sun was filmed, but she looked younger.  

Finally we have Nicholas Clay, who like Birkin was 35 when Sun was filmed but could have passed for at least five years younger.  He actually had his first film role as an adult in a mystery thriller, The Night Digger, a suspense film scripted by Roald Dahl and starring Dahl's Oscar-winning actress wife Patricia Neal.  Clay's film career peaked in 1981-1982, a surprisingly short time considering the actor's genuine talent, charm and exceptional good looks.  

Based on his Patrick Redfern, one might actually have thought he would have been in contention to replace Roger Moore as James Bond.  But such, alas, was not the case and throughout the rest of the Eighties and the Nineties (he died from cancer in 2000 at age 53) Clay was mostly to be found on British television or the stage.  And not even an episode of Poirot, though he did appear in Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes series!

Director Guy Hamilton said for Patrick he wanted someone like old film star actor Michael Rennie and Clay fit that bill and then some: "handsome, dashing, physical, romantic.  Nick has it all.  A fine sense of timing, the right looks and a good physique."  I think that's a fair estimation.  Clay certainly looks like someone who would knock women (and gay men) off their feet and he plays the role with great charm and verve, especially in the dénouement, when Poirot gives his classic drawing room lecture at the hotel (more on this below).  He gives Patrick a seductive soft Irish accent.  (Patrick is said to be Irish in the book, as the Christian name indicates.)  

The Redferns check in.  

Christine tunes out.  

an homage, I think, to the frontis map of the island in the novel

Patrick and Poirot discuss a dead language.

Patrick and his pipe

Patrick and his polka dots

Well, I think I've made it clear that I prefer the film to the novel in terms of the dialogue and characterization.  How about the plotting?  

SPOILERS

The errant husband?

Evil under the Sun seems clearly one of the more popular Agatha Christie novels, though for my part on rereading it I had some issues with it.  But the mechanics of the murder plot are very good, highly ingenious if highly implausible.  

Christie employs the "triangle plot," where you ultimately find the romantic conflicts among two women and one man aren't what you think they are.  Here we are supposed to think that naive Patrick Redfern has been caught up in seductive Arlena's womanly web, when in reality she has been ensnared in an evil plot by Patrick and his cooly efficient wife, who turns out to be anything but a wilting wallflower.  It's a variant on Death on the Nile and a fine Poirot novella from the same period, "Triangle at Rhodes."

Psychologically I think the film is more convincing, in that we get to see these characters and are not just told about them.  Arlena is supposed to be the victim rather than Patrick, you see, someone who is manipulated rather a manipulator.  One can appreciate this rather better in the film, I find.  

The woman between?

For one thing Patrick is f'ing gorgeous--excuse the vulgarity!  With his soft Irish burr and limpid blue eyes, he simply radiates seductive charm.  He's also eight years younger than Rigg and could pass still for his late twenties, while Arlena, though gorgeous too, looks her age, I would say.  (Diana Rigg I believe was a great smoker.)  

In the book Christie described Arlena as auburn-haired (too bad Hastings wasn't there), with her face having "that slight hardness which is seen when thirty years have come and gone"--though "the whole effect of her was one of youth--of superb and triumphant vitality."  Additionally, the author tells us: "There was a Chinese immobility about her face, and an upward slant to the dark blue eyes."  

Rigg has that slight hardness, though I wouldn't say her whole effect was one of youth.  She does capture that "Chinese immobility," however, especially in that red sun hat (jade in the book).    

Significantly the film actually has Poirot first encounter the Redferns, unbeknownst to them, at a hotel on the French Riviera, where he had gone to meet Horace Blatt on his boat.  (I feel certain that it's Patrick in his skimpy black bathing suit whom we glimpse dashing down the beach to the water early on in the film.)  

The neglected wife?

At the restaurant, where Poirot is devouring some creamy ladyfinger dessert studded with bright jewel like fruits resembling certain of the characters' costumes, the sleuth sees and overhears the Redferns arguing with each other at another table. 

Christine huffs off to take care of some matter with the hotel, leaving Patrick alone to go and canoodle with a woman whom Poirot will later identify, by her distinctive bracelet, as Arlena. But it's the woman who is lovingly caressing Patrick's face with her fingers (with Arlena's bright red fingernails--in films bitches always have nails like these said Rigg in the interview).  Patrick sits back rather smugly receiving his due.  

I think that helps to suggest to Poirot the true nature of their relationship.  Shaffer also drops some additional clues about Patrick having a previous, murderous identity that we do not get in the book.  

Interestingly Diana Rigg the same year as Sun starred in a TV-film version of  Christie's famous courtroom mystery play Witness for the Prosecution.  Her character similarly is a middle-aged woman deluded by a designing handsome younger man.  Nicholas Clay would have been swell in that role too, certainly better than American Beau Bridges (Jeff's brother), who was actually cast.  

a jewel of a dessert

our introduction to Christine and Patrick, bickering

Patrick looking like the cat that swallowed all the cream after Christine absents herself,
as a partly glimpsed, red-nailed Arlena strokes his pretty face.

The Redferns stage one of their "fights" for hotel eavesdroppers.

Arlena's murder has affinity to Nile as well.  When Christine dashes around the little island to get to the scene of crime and back in time, I was reminded of Simon running about the Karnak in his stockinged feet, as it were, to get to the murder scene and back in time.  It's a clever affair in its own right, is the Sun murder plot, the best thing about the book in my view, and the film follows it pretty closely.  

Some of the changes are minor.  Instead of a church's chimes playing a role in the affair, it's the shooting of a cannon to celebrate Tyrania's one military victory in history.  The film has Christine knocking out Arlena with a rock rather than having Arlena hiding in the cave to avoid Christine while the deception is staged (Christine masquerading as Arlena's dead sunbathing body, wearing artificial tan on her legs and arms with a Chinese sun hat over her face).  

A Tale of Two Bodies: The first eleven pics show Patrick and his dupe Carrie Gardener boating around the island, where they seemingly discover Arlena's dead body on the beach, while the next seven pics come from the later flashback sequence, in which we learn that the body really belongs to Christine, masquerading as Arlena's corpse.

Patrick sets put to find Arlena.  Note the phallic post.  

Carrie invites herself on a trip.  

Patrick puts on his game face.  (He actually needs a witness.)

The boat sets out.

An excursion next to Patrick, who wouldn't be smiling?

Catching some rays and pulling some ploys.  

Arlena, wake up!

Strangled!!!

Patrick's so upset he forgot to pull his swim trunks up. 
Honestly, you could do a lot with PG films in those days.

Really, those swim trunks are about to go.  We could be at Chippendale's.

Mere words fail.  

Patrick butts in.  

Arlena?

Arlena's dead!

Hi, honey, good work!

Get help!  I'll stay with the body.

The body's alive! 
Note Patrick's wristwatch (if you can peel your eyes away from something else).
Time is essential to him and Christine.

Mission Accomplished, darling!  Or was it?

Both of these ploys are gravely problematic when you think about it, but the book's probably more so.  the film allows for the scene where Arlena wakes up in the cave, dazed and vulnerable, only to turn to Patrick, who viciously strangles her.  It's the only time in the film when there's any actual horror, besides when Daphne, in an odd scene, spies a dead, maggot-infested rabbit on a walk.  (I guess this is symbolic of serpents in Eden, etc.)

Arlena wakes up in a daze.

the hands of a strangler

the handsome face of the devil

The script jettisons the rather pointless drug plot from the book (I suppose it serves a purpose as a distraction for the police) and Linda's dabbling with witchcraft and her attempted suicide,  certainly  a heavy moment that would be out of place in the film.  Horace Blatt now is no drug runner but the cheated owner of the diamond.  The diamond now provides the motive for the crime, in that Patrick had stolen it from Arlena, substituting a paste gem, which was what Arlena, duped, returned to Sir Horace. 

Patrick has got to get rid of the actress if he wants to keep the gem.  Thus the diamond replaces the theft of Arlena's inheritance by Patrick.  It allows for the cute scene where Poirot reveals that the real diamond is hidden in the bowl of Patrick's pipe, which he tellingly never smokes.  A pipe actually plays a role in the book, though in a different way.  This felt like an homage to one of Christie's short stories.  

Poirot offers Patrick a light.

In both the book and the film Patrick is exposed as a prior strangulation murderer, with the connivance of his Christine.  (Are they actually married, I wonder?  And are they basically psychopaths?)  The first murder was of Patrick's then wife, whose life he had insured for a goodly sum.  Christie methinks was inspired by the real life Brides in the Bath murderer, executed in 1915, who always repeated himself until he was caught.  

Patrick's prior murder is revealed more artfully in the film, as is his and Christine's final apprehension. Patrick tells Poirot basically to get stuffed, that he can't prove any of these accusations about Arlena, and then he and Christine go up to pack their bags and leave the hotel.  (It's a weak spot from a purely logical standpoint in Death in the Nile that Simon and Jacqueline crumple so easily.)  

In a stunning transformation Christine descends the grand hotel stairs looking like a goddess, utterly stunning in a chic black and white dress and hat, and the two smug crooks prepare triumphantly to depart.  Then Poirot, ever the showman, completely pulls the rug out from under them.  An enraged Patrick then sucker punches Poirot (it was bound to happen sometime), who is all full of himself as usual.  This is played for laughs, where in the book, Patrick actually starts to strangle Poirot.  (He's a strangler, see?)  Again the film is more sheerly fun.  

Christine reveals her true face.

Patrick mocks Poirot.  

A stunning transformation!

Wait just a minute!  A question about your check. 

Poirot is proud as a peacock. 

But Patrick gets the punch line.

Someone was bound to deck Poirot during one of the drawing room expositions.

END SPOILERS

Still, don't count Dame Agatha out when it comes to quirky humor.  She actually has a very funny bit early in the book concerning Mrs. Gardener's claim that sunlight causes women to grow hair on their limbs and breasts.  That bit's not in the film, but there are actual lines from the book that are, so I hope you won't find that the film departed too far from Christie's original text.  I thought it a most impressive translation that did justice to the Queen of Crime. 

The 1974 Murder on the Orient Express received six Academy Award nominations: for best actor (Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot) and best supporting actress (Ingrid Bergman as the anguished Swedish missionary, who won), as well as for adapted screenplay, cinematography, costume design and score.  Four years later Death on the Nile received but a single Oscar nomination, for Anthony Powell's costume design, which in a perceived upset the film won over The Wiz.  

Surprisingly to me, Evil under the Sun received no Oscar nominations at all, although it was nominated for an Edgar for best crime film by the Mystery Writers of America. (It lost to a British gangster film with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.)  Death on the Nile lost the Edgar to Magic, a psychological suspense thriller starring Anthony Hopkins, while Express lost to the iconic noir film Chinatown.

Murder on the Orient Express took the world by surprise in 1974 and became one of the biggest box office hits of the year, lauded by critics.  Evil under the Sun received much more mixed reviews, with some critics disparaging the whole drawing room mystery tradition associated with Agatha Christie and other English mystery writers.  

Some of them even quoted famously mystery-hating critic Edmund Wilson's essay "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?"  (Roger Ebert, however, for his part awarded the film three stars, praising its "style and irreverence" and stating that it was superior to Express and Nile as well as the recent Miss Marple film The Mirror Crack'd.)

Bottoming out, Appointment with Death in 1989 did not even receive an Edgar nomination, and faded away almost without a trace.  Agatha Christie books and other classic mysteries for decades became something solely for the small screen.  

Yet director Rian Johnson, whose hit film Knives Out (2019) revived the big screen humorous drawing room mystery, cited Evil under the Sun as an influence on his own film.  Discarded things have a way of coming back in style again, and I hope we see more adaptations of Golden Age mysteries, on large and little screens alike, that are like it.  

Last lines of the film:
Daphne, forking soft food to Poirot:
I've just had a phone call from his majesty and he is very pleased with...
Poirot: The King of Tyrania?
Daphne: He is very pleased with the matter being cleared up so quickly and so discreetly. 
He is so pleased he is awarding you the Order of Saint Gudrun the Inquisitive.
Poirot: Saint Gudrun the Inquisitive?
Daphne: First class.
Poirot: How many classes are there?