Evil Under the Sun
First screened in September 2007 / Most recently screened and reviewed in September 2024
Director: Guy Hamilton. Cast: Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, Peter Quilley, Jane Birkin, Nicholas Clay, Colin Blakley, Nicholas Clay, Emily Hone, James Mason, Roddy McDowall, Sylvia Miles. Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer (based on the novel by Agatha Christie). VOR:②
A version minus all the camp might have felt more integrated but also more run-of-the-mill. Tonal approach thus a modest risk.
"The First Wives Club is a great example of a sprightly entertainment, a fan favorite, and a valuable market corrective that you can't really stretch to call a good movie (unless those are your top criteria, in which case, agreed!)." — Me, two days ago
You can substitute Evil Under the Sun here for The First Wives Club, even if playing Agatha Christie principally for laughs isn't so much a "valuable market corrective" as a reasonably fresh approach to a famous body of work (and another apt mission for Maggie Smith). Despite my friend Tim's very clear expectation-setting when he introduced me to this in 2007, I so wasn't prepared for this tone: not quite an outright spoof like Murder by Death but much less bulky and straight-faced than Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express. And bless it for that! The film hardly makes any bones about being only half-serious. We're barely ten minutes in before Diana Rigg is sassing people like a drag queen doing Auntie Mame and Mary Poppins ("Do stop standing there like a a cough drop and say 'Good morning'"), and barely two minutes further before Rigg and Smith are giving a Dorian Corey-level seminar in Reading vs. Shade.
Maggie Smith saying "have a sausage" is hilarious. Even the costumes are hilarious, as when aggressively mousy and sun-shy Jane Birkin shows up on the shiny Tyranian coast wearing the drapy robes of at least three Fremen from Dune. ("Tyrania" is itself a joke.) Sylvia Miles being married to James Mason is hilarious. Roddy McDowall exorcising a whole career's worth of coerced closeting with one epic bonfire of the effeminacies is hilarious. The fact that production was moved from Christie's Devonshire location to the island of Mallorca because the director already lived there is hilarious. Who doesn't want to walk to work?
I totally respect nudging Christie into a new idiomatic direction. The books often leave room for comedy, and why honor any nascent tradition laid down by Orient Express or Death on the Nile, those opulent, endless, mostly lead-footed corteges? (It's our funeral, both times.) One might, of course, have saved some room for detective guesswork, but Evil Under the Sun can barely be bothered. Especially as directed by Goldfinger's Guy Hamilton, the answer to the puzzle is flagrantly solvable. The blocking and interior lighting tilt a little more "dinner theater" than the earlier, pricier adaptations did, and I'm confident that Hellraiser editor Richard Marden could have found 5-10 more minutes to cut.
I can't counter anybody who calls Evil under the Sun thin and frivolous. I was once among your number, and I basically still am, with the key difference that I've now been won over to this version of frivolity. I can't begrudge this many actors snacking on their lines and personas: Ustinov treating the movie like it's a dessert cheese, Miles like it's barbecue, Rigg and Smith like it's fruit salad with an arsenic glaze. You don't keep watching in order to crack the case but to see what everyone will wear next. And the clothes are funny instead of suffocatingly luxe, from Rigg's scarlet, yurt-shaped beach hat to Smith's white pantsuit bedazzled with Froot Loops to Nicholas Clay's Suddenly, Last Summer swim trunks.
Would I have minded some tension or some stakes? No! Was I contented with and often charmed by a petulant teen, an officious hotelier, and a series of giant-buttoned exo-Spanks, meant to help Ustinov squeeze into formalwear and swimwear alike? Reader, I was. If Michael Frayn wrote a 40th-anniversary sequel to Noises Off where the same troupe attempts to put on a single-location murder-mystery instead of a door-slamming sex farce, Evil under the Sun would work perfectly as the play within a play. That's a backhanded compliment, sure, but a compliment still. There's nothing remotely on the order of "evil" under this Adriatic sun. In fact, there's not much under this sun, period. The movie's hardly a showcase of craft or a capsule of its time, but I admire a crew that can pack light, especially when they're clearly heading out on vacation. Grade:C+
