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OT: Death on the Nile: A Remake of a Sequel (Psycho/Frenzy Relevance)

posted 2 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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I will put this on the Death on the Nile page, but its relevance to Hitchcock and two of his movies in particular strikes me as fitting for here.

To wit: Gus Van Sant famously (and somewhat poorly) remade Hitchcock's Psycho in 1998. The poorness was mainly in the terribly miscast casting, but there was also the issue that what was landmark in 1960 was passe in 1998.

Had Van Sant's Psycho been a hit, I wonder: would someone have remade Psycho II?(From 1983.)

It was hard for me to even picture, because I think that Psycho II is levels down from Psycho, across the board. Even the performance of an older and more haggard Tony Perkins isn't up to his work in the first film(though Vera Miles rather stunningly picked up the thread of angry, righteous Lila 23 years later.)

It remains a personal conundrum to me that while I find the original 1960 Psycho endlessly fascinating, its crop of sequels seem so disconnnected from the original film that I can't connect ANY of them as having any real meaning. Its very weird. How could the original have so much meaning, and the sequels...none. (Though Psycho III came a bit closer in really ANALYZING elements of the original; it wasn't as well made or cast.)

A question: Halloween II took place in ah local hospital the night of the killings in the original. Was "Halloween II" remade? In a hospital? I really haven't kept track of these things, but I know that Halloween got a remake, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got a remake but ---

has anyone remade a SEQUEL to date?

We got the answer this week in one instance: Yes. Death on the Nile.

In that great movie year of 1974, Sidney Lumet gave us "Murder on the Orient Express," from an Agatha Christie novel, and with a pretty damn-near all star cast, anchored by one modern superstar(Sean Connery) surrounded by stars of an older age : Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Richard Widmark. Plus a Psycho reunion for Anthony Perkins and Martin Balsam. In the 14 years since Psycho, Balsam had won an Oscar and risen to near star-parity with Perkins -- they were BOTH top character men now(and Balsam was billed before Perkins in the Orient Express alphabetical cast.)

"Orient Express" had some British stars to go with the Americans: Vanessa Redgrave(luminous as Connery's love interest); Wendy Hiller, John Gielgud(as a butler --he'd win an Oscar as such for Arthur in 1981) and the lead of the picture: Albert Finney as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

Hitchcock fans took note of the number of Hitchcock stars in the movie: Bergman(above all), Perkins, Balsam...Connery and Gielgud.

"Orient Express" came out the same 1974 Christmas season as The Towering Inferno and the two movies were compared: which had the more all-star cast? Well, Inferno had Steve McQueen and Paul Newman at the top of the cast(rather TWO Sean Connerys), Faye Dunaway, and Old Time stars William Holden, Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones. Advantage Inferno if only for the historic McQueen/Newman pairing but still -- "Orient Express" was pretty starry.

1978 brought the sequel to "Orient Express": Death on the Nile. It felt then -- and it feels now -- like the sequel could not QUITE match the first one in starriness. Poirot was now played by the "less prestige" Peter Ustinov -- an Oscar-winning character star, more "fun" than Finney but somehow less "method impressive"(Finney had buried his face and head in jowls that made him unrecognizable.)

Ustinov was more entertaining and accessible than Finney as Poirot, and would play him at least one more time, but...it felt a bit "lesser."

Nor did Death on the Nile have a superstar on the order of Sean Connery in it.

Still, the film did manage to pull a good mix of "old time" and "new time" stars together for the new film. Bette Davis was certainly a classic star -- and was paired with fellow Best Actress winner Maggie Smith as her bickering assistant. David Niven had been something for decades -- right up to the "Guns of Navarone" and "The Pink Panther" in the 60s, and felt, in 1978, very nostalgic(no longer "big," but with gravitas.)

Personally, I liked how "Death on the Nile" threw in two All-American character greats -- Jack Warden and George Kennedy. They were like "lifelines to mainstream American films," and Warden played his part with a funny German accent(THAT accent is still allowed.)

The film also had Mia Farrow in a very interesting role --one of her best away from Woody(and after her peak in Rosemary's Baby.) And as real "kicker," the movie had Angela Lansbury -- two years ahead of playing Miss Marple and a few more ahead of the Christie-esque Murder She Wrote.

Hitchcock buffs got something rather specific in Death on the Nile: Jon Finch, 6 years after "starring"(as a non-star) in Hitchcock's Frenzy, and here reduced to support. Very handsome support, shorn of his "Frenzy" moustache and quite fragile looking (his Johnny Deppness was even more apparent.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Frenzy loomed more importantly over Death on the Nile because of the selected screenwriter: Anthony Shaffer. Shaffer famously wrote the Frenzy script that "saved" Hitchocck in the same year that Shaffer's hit play "Sleuth" reached the screen. 1972 was Shaffer's year, and Anthony Sleuth Frenzy Shaffer" became his name.

A mere six years later, evidently the bloom was off Shaffer's rose; not much was made of his "Death on the Nile" script, but I sensed something of Frenzy to the whole affair: very witty , erudite dialogue and a surprisingly realistic brutality to the murders.

Agatha Christie's murders were always rather subdued, prim and proper on the page. But in Death on the Nile, one feels that murder can be most foul. There are point blank gunshots into faces and heads and a graphic throat slitting. The gun murders are frequent enough to create distress. The killer comes off as near-psychotic. The whole enterprise is a mix of the "quaint"(Bette Davis, David Niven) and the gory.

Bonus: Death on the Nile 1978 has a score by Nino Rota(The Godfather) that opens in Herrmanesque majesty as the river boat begins its journey much as the Orient Express began its -- the isolation of both modes of travel is nicely Hitchcockian to me.

Surprise: I liked Death on the Nile a lot better than Murder on the Orient Express. The sequel seemed faster on its feet than the original, the brutality of the murders fed my Psycho-gore appetite, and it was fun having Jack Warden and George Kennedy hanging around the affair like interlopers. Mia Farrow was QUITE good; I've always remembered her in this. And Bette Davis and Maggie Smith were quite the comedy team , throwing one-liner insults at each other ("Anthony Shaffer does Aaron Sorkin.")

Also, I think that the "explanation scene" in Murder on the Orient Express is MUCH more boring than the shrink scene in Psycho. I've compared them in the past, and I might compare them in the future.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Some decades after "Murder on the Orient Express" hit big in 1974, Kenneth Branaugh brought forth a remake. He directed and starred himself as Poirot -- sporting a gigantic (in all directions) moustache that made his Poirot somewhat of a special effect. He TRIED to generate an "all star cast" but alas, we have so fewer of them today -- even going back in time.

The best Branaugh could do for a superstar anchor(ala Connery) was Johnny Depp....good as always but already "tainted" with his stardom about to collapse on him. The film had a "Psycho-esque" use for Depp -- he's killed before the movie is half over (Richard Widmark had his role -- as an American gangster -- in the original.)

The film had Daisy Ridley, star of the hugely seen, not terribly remembered "Star Wars" prequels. And Michelle Pfeiffer ably filling Lauren Bacalls shoes as a sharp-tongued rich American widow. Rail thin Anthony Perkins became corpulent young Josh Gad (with little star resonsance.) Quality casting included Judi Dench and Olivia Coleman.

The new "Orient Express" simply didn't seem as star-studded as the original and there's this -- the solution to the crime is much more predictable than the one in Death on the Nile, so it seemed "doubly" disappointing in a remake(one supposes that the solution was now as well known as the twist in Psycho?)

And Branaugh's Poirot was OK but -neither as "prestige" as Albert Finney nor as fun as Peter Ustinov. (Branaugh seemed to get devalued after playing the bad guy in "Wild Wild West" but has come back this year with Belfast.)

I have seen both "Murder on the Orient Express" films. I have only seen the original "Death on the Nile" (and liked it very much, I'll toss in kudos for the weirdly nostalgic vibe I got from David Niven in that movie.) I have not seen the new Death on the Nile, but elements intrigue me.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Death on the Nile isn't a "logical" sequel to Orient Express is it? Its simply the second Christie novel that the producers of the 1974 Orient Express chose to film -- and they didn't even use the same actor as Poirot.

But Branaugh is trying to duplicate a franchise rather than a story -- Orient Express first, Death on the Nile second. And with the same Poirot.

I will certainly not tell "whodunnit" in Death on the Nile, and I'm waiting to see if the remake has the same solution. I'll be curious to see if the violence of the murders retains the same brutality of the 1978 film.

Early reviews say a BIG problem with Branaugh's "Death on the Nile" is that the location exteriors of the original (on the Nile River, with stop off on land) have been replaced by CGI green screen shot. Yech but...we are in the 21st Century now.

The cast? One fairly new minted superstar -- Gal Gadot (based on Wonder Woman alone, it would seem, but this IS the comid book era.) Gadot has a role played by non-star Lois Chiles in the original. Hmm.

There's a problematic male lead - Armie Hammer -- who has gone the Johnny Depp route to career collapse much faster, they are trying to promote the movie without really mentioning Hammer at all. (I wonder if they reconsidered re-casting him in a new shoot as they did with Christopher Plummer in for Kevin Spacey in that movie that time?)

The British comedy team of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French take over the Bette Davis/Maggie Smith insult team. I figure that Saunders and French will be a big draw for the British market and American PBS watchers -- and Saunders went on to team up with Joanna Lumley on Absolutely Fabulous, which Saunders an even bigger star. Still -- not quite Bette Davis and Maggie Smith.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Looking for other "names" in the cast of the new Death on the Nile, I find Annette Bening(prestige) and Russell Brand(once a wild man, here, evidently, subdued.) I'm not familiar with all modern stars, so I may be missing one or two.

I'll probably see the new "Death on the Nile" if only to complete the comparison of the new "one-two pair" of Christies to the ones from 1974 and 1978.

But I KNOW that the new Orient Express wasn't as exciting(in star casting) as the original, and I THINK that the new Death on the Nile feels lacking as well.

I exit where I opened: perhaps the most interesting thing about the new Death on the Nile is how an attempt is being made here to remake a pair of movies.

What IF they remade Psycho II?
What IF they remade Alien AND Aliens?
What IF they remade The Godfather AND Godfather II?

..I doubt it would work. I hope they never try.

[–] swanstep (2628) 2 years ago

Shaffer famously wrote the Frenzy script that "saved" Hitchocck in the same year that Shaffer's hit play "Sleuth" reached the screen. 1972 was Shaffer's year, and Anthony Sleuth Frenzy Shaffer" became his name.

Don't forget Shaffer writing 'The Wicker Man' as an original screenplay in 1973. Dude was on fire!

According to wikipedia Shaffer moved to Australia in 1975 (marrying there a hot actress, Diane Cilento, who he'd met on Wicker Man and who had previously been married to Connery!). This archived page has more biographical details:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120208025150/http://www.anthonyshaffer.co.uk/biography%202.html
but the upshot is that Shaffer, who mostly lived not in a big city but in a hellishly hot/tropical/rural/even-now-very-off-the-grid part of Australia was mostly engaged in a grand folly with Cilento. They ran a farm and built a fancy, Greek-style outdoor theater on their property to put on austere/artsy plays. *Maybe* Sydney or Melbourne at the time could have supported such a theater, but not a county whose pop. in *2016* was under 2000 people. Shaffer and Cilento bought restaurants as if they didn't already have enough on their plates. It all sounds like a money pit and a career-killer.

Note that Shaffer's identical twin brother, Peter became a *very* bigshot playwright at the same time and two of *his* plays became big-brained movies: Equus and Amadeus. Somebody should writer a Shaffer-like mind-trip of a play about Anthony and Peter.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Don't forget Shaffer writing 'The Wicker Man' as an original screenplay in 1973. Dude was on fire!

---

He sure hit big fast. Funny thing, though. I lived through 1972 into 1973 reading all these articles and reviews that locked Anthony Shaffer, Sleuth, and Frenzy into one "package." I sort of thought that Shaffer's success with Sleuth ELEVATED Frenzy, made it look better than it was. (That said, once I saw the Oliver/Caine film of Sleuth, with its ridiculously solvable twist -- Frenzy looked a lot better.)

My point: all this Shaffer/Sleuth/Frenzy press locked in but I PERSONALLY wasn't aware of The Wicker Man until about 1979...when it got a re-release and a movie magazine cover ("Cinefantastique.") If The Wicker Man was a big deal in 1973, I guess I missed it then.

But TODAY, he's Anthony Sleuth Frenzy Wicker Man Shaffer. Hah.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

According to wikipedia Shaffer moved to Australia in 1975 (marrying there a hot actress, Diane Cilento, who he'd met on Wicker Man and who had previously been married to Connery!).

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I know that Cilento was in Tom Jones(where her hotness was personified), but to me , she will always be unforgettable as the sole decent woman(and almost the sole decent PERSON) in the bleak Paul Newman Western Hombre (1967)

Hombre has a bit of a cult -- on the old imdb pages, we talked about it as much as Psycho(and Martin Balsam is in each movie.) Some of that talk is archived at moviechat.

Hombre is a movie of tough, terse one-liners courtesy of early Elmore Leonard. Newman is a ridiculously stoic and uncommunicative anti-hero; the Great Richard Boone is his usual flavorful baddie, Fredric March lends prestige, Martin Balsam is his reliable self(here as a Mexican-American when that was allowable) but.. Diane Cilento rather holds her own in what now seems to be the ONLY movie she is remembered for. She's tough, sexy, redheaded, full of one-liners herself, and very decent -- so decent that a key character sacrifices his life solely to meet her standards of decency. Its very moving.

Sean Connery revealed in later years that he really respected his ex-wife's work in Hombre.

And here she is moving on from a Hitchcock star(Marnie) to a Hitchcock writer(Frenzy.) Six degrees?

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

his archived page has more biographical details:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120208025150/http://www.anthonyshaffer.co.uk/biography%202.html
but the upshot is that Shaffer, who mostly lived not in a big city but in a hellishly hot/tropical/rural/even-now-very-off-the-grid part of Australia was mostly engaged in a grand folly with Cilento. They ran a farm and built a fancy, Greek-style outdoor theater on their property to put on austere/artsy plays. *Maybe* Sydney or Melbourne at the time could have supported such a theater, but not a county whose pop. in *2016* was under 2000 people. Shaffer and Cilento bought restaurants as if they didn't already have enough on their plates. It all sounds like a money pit and a career-killer.

---

An interesting read. I was surprised to see that Anthony Shaffer seemed to make his living quite a bit off of those Agatha Christie movies -- credited on Death on the Nile, UNCREDITED on "Orient Express"(which meant he was writing for Sean Connery and Anthony Perkins!) and then on to Evil Under the Sun and some other Christie productions(same producers.) Oh, well - people gotta eat. And I don't think those were BAD movies. .they just sort of trailed on down from being very special (Orient Express) to ...routine.

I hope his ventures with Cilento didn't seriously break them. I'll have to check imdb: did Cilento work as an actress for many more years? Sounds like an "off the grid" existence, indeed.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

The "Frenzy" DVD (from around 2000/2001?) has a documentary in which stars Jon Finch, Barry Foster, and Anna Massey are intercut with Anthony Shaffer -- and Shaffer comes off as very interesting. White haired and bearded -- not at all his look during the making of Frenzy. A certain hauteur --- he swore that he had to talk Hitchcock OUT of filming Anna Massey's rape murder with the same detail given to Barbara Leigh-Hunts'("It would be disgusting a second time") and he came up with the "Farewell to Babs" staircase shot instead. (Sure...but Hitchcock had to approve it and film it.)

The fate of Hitchcock screenwriters was illuminating to me. John Michael Hayes did four Hitchcocks in a row( a record) and soldierd on to write Peyton Place, The Carpetbaggers, and other prurient hits. Ernest Lehman parlayed NXNW into producing/writing duties on some BIGGIES: West Side Story, The Sound of Music...Virginia Woolf? Lehman crashed with Hello Dolly(he produced it) and Portnoy's Complaint(he directed it) but Hitchocck saved him as a screenwriter with Family Plot...or was that a comedown? A curious career, but I think Lehman was always rich after West Side Story et al.

Poor Joseph Stefano. He hit big (for low pay) with Psycho. Then got famous with The Outer Limits (for two years.) Then...DECADES of struggle, TV movies, B pictures, and what seems to have been stretches Leh of unemployment. Thank God he got a big pay day to touch up his script for Van Sant's Psycho.

Anyway..Anthony Shaffer. That website shows that he kept writing movies and plays and TV movies...stayed alive. Somehwere between Lehman and Stefano in success, I'd guess.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

And wait!

I had a significant other at one time who loved movies, and kept urging me to find one from her childhood called "Forbush and the Penguins." This was pre-Amazon, but I found a copy eventually on the net. Its not entirely a children's movie, and it stars John Hurt(Alien) but...

...I checked the screenwriter: Anthony Shaffer.

I told her I couldn't believe that this sweet movie about a man and his penguins could have been written by the man who wrote Frenzy. But it was.

She liked the penguin movie better than Frenzy!

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Note that Shaffer's identical twin brother, Peter became a *very* bigshot playwright at the same time and two of *his* plays became big-brained movies: Equus and Amadeus. Somebody should writer a Shaffer-like mind-trip of a play about Anthony and Peter

---

I forgot about the other brother -- ouch, a bit of a competition, the other brother had the more "prestige" works. On topic: Anthony Perkins was one of the people who played the lead in "Equus" on Broadway; and I remember a Film Comment article that compared Amadeus TO Psycho -- seeing Salieri and Norman as the same envious killer...taking out Marion and Mozart for roughly the same reasons(envy, not sex.) . They even put a photo of Perkins in the cell side by side with one of F. Murray Abraham lost in guilt as an old man.

[–] swanstep (2628) 2 years ago

Hombre is a movie of tough, terse one-liners courtesy of early Elmore Leonard. ... Diane Cilento rather holds her own in what now seems to be the ONLY movie she is remembered for. She's tough, sexy, redheaded, full of one-liners herself, and very decent

OK, I'm going to *have* to check out Hombre now. Director Martin Ritt is one of those guys that I tend to forget about, perhaps because he's seemed to me to be one of those no-signature, 'serves the material' types. The films of his I've seen, Hud, Spy Who Came In From The Cold, The Front are all very enjoyable but don't *feel* obviously like the work of the same dude. Maybe Hombre (which must overlap in some respects with Hud) will solidify Ritt for me.

I recently found a copy of (the very hard to track down) Navajo Joe online (at tubi.tv) so maybe I'll have a mid-'60s-Western gap-filling evening with both NJ and Hombre this week.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

OK, I'm going to *have* to check out Hombre now.

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Well, its like a lot of movies I discuss around here. "You had to be there." 1967 was a long time ago, and Hombre seems to have hit its stride(in the US) on the ABC Sunday night movie into the 70's.

Some Hitchcock trivia: right before Paul Newman made Torn Curtain, he worked with Janet Leigh on Harper. Right after Paul Newman made Torn curtain he worked with Martin Balsam on Hombre. Newman must have wondered how he drew a "bum" Hitchcock movie after working with the Psycho stars!

Its funny. "Objectively," 1967 was a landmark year: Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate brought in New Hollywood; In the Heat of the Night was topical, The Dirty Dozen was a tough anti-war war movie(giant hit) Sidney Poitier starred in three big films.

And here I choose Wait Until Dark and Hotel as my Number One/Number Two films. Well, they were both slick Warner Brothers productions. I liked plushness and slickness back then.Wait Until Dark was a scream night at the movies for all memory. Hotel -- I just liked for its suaveness and score.

But hey: Hombre, too. I gotta make that 1967 list bigger.

---

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Director Martin Ritt is one of those guys that I tend to forget about, perhaps because he's seemed to me to be one of those no-signature, 'serves the material' types.

--
Well, he got some "auteur" coverage, but then ALL directors did back then. He did New York movies, he did Texas movies, he did London movies. A "socially conscious" theme drifted through them. Sounder was big for him in 1972.

Speaking of New York movies, Martin Balsam said this of Hombre: "Its a lean New York social drama...set in 1880s Arizona." Hey, maybe.

It was sold as "from the director, screenwriters and star of Hud." I think Ritt took those screenwriters with him to Sounder, too. But what makes Hombre different is Elmore Leonard. Its a Western that plays like a crime movie (as well as a lean New York social drama.)

Give it a try. In some ways it is Diane Cilento's finest hour -- a well written role for a woman, holding her own against Newman and March and Boone...and Balsam.

Some of us wrote some crazy stuff about Hombre over at its board.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Returning -- OT -- to note that I have now seen the new Death on the Nile.

It was...OK. And also interesting in a couple of ways comparing "then and now."

Unavoidably, I prefer the original mainly for its cast -- David Niven, Bette Davis, Peter Ustinov were stars of "my time" and entertaining in a way nobody can be in the new movie. Maggie Smith(in the same year she won the Oscar, again, this time for California Suite) is great in tandem with Davis. Jack Warden and George Kennedy were personal favorites, and there is no room for their "types" here. Indeed, Russell Brand gets the Warden role(without a German accent, and without his madcap "Russell Brandness" -- he plays it quite straight) and I'm unfamiliar with the actor who gets the Kennedy role.

Angela Lansbury's character flat out disappears and is replaced with another one entirely -- not played by anyone with Lansbury's flair.

So the star power -- at least the FLAMBOYANT star power -- is missing.

Also missing: Nino Rota's great , powerful Herrmannesque opening credit music...I can't remember the music from this one.

What director Kenneth Branaugh(who also of course plays Poirot) and writer Michael Green have done, I think, is to add a great big powerful dose of sad EMOTION to the story this time. A prologue (not in the 1978 movie, not in the original Christie book?) give Poirot a sad beginning, the final murder gives Poirot a sad ending. Here is a "murder mystery" in which at least one of the murders creates near tear-jerking sadness...and that gives this version of the film more of a seriousness than the original.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I have not read the original novel, but the new movie gives us two African-American characters who were not there in 1978, and some gay ones, too. This strikes me as the way that our movies are going to be from here on out, whatever Agatha Christie wrote "all white" in the first half of the 20th century is now fair game to be re-cast racially and gender-wise in the 21st. The marketplace will decide, but I don't think we're going back.

It is sensitive ground to walk on, but if there is a debate here about whether or not this casting should be done when the original text was "all white," seems to require a sense of the casting matching the type of story.

I don't think it would do well to cast a young white actor as one of the kids in Boyz n' the Hood. Reverseably, American Graffiti is a memory of some white teenagers in Modesto in 1962 and probably SPOKE first to white adults in 1973.

The movies will "sort this out" going forward -- which stories to tell with which races and genders, etc.

I like Licorice Pizza, this year, and its mainly a "memory" tale of the young love of...two white kids, with white friends, interacting with white movie stars. I believe that the only African-American is a pretty young woman who first sells our teenage hero a waterbed. And the movie is taking hits for the use of two Japanese actresses as part of a joke.

"Death on the Nile" goes the extra step of having the two female African-American characters offered up as love interests to two white men.

These will be interesting times. The issue of changing movie characters races and genders as a matter of REQUIRED policy? I'm not sure how that works with telling real stories. But it is where we are.