THE SCREEN: The Detective and the Dun
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE DETECTIVE AND THE DUN THE SCREEN Hercule Poirot and John Collins are birds of a feather, though you'd never know it just to look at .them. Poirot is of course Agatha Christie's famous...
...Skiptracer's is because self-doubt and redemption are simply inconceivable for someone like Colli.ns, who is a sort of anti-hero version of Jack Webb in Dragnet...
...The former has been shot in very grainy, harshly-lit color...
...The ending of Death on the Nile is equally impossible, though, because it expects us to admire Poirot (.Peter Ustinov) for being who he is...
...It is a very small world where Poirot knows or is known to everyone...
...But different as they look, what these two films are really offering us, ra, ther than a drama, is a sort of travelogue...
...He travels first-class all over the world--the prewar world of high society, that is...
...A jilted lover who has come to the Nile to torment her ex- and his new wife on their honeymoon, Jacqueline does so by constantly popping out from behind pyramids and statues to rattle off tour-guide lectures in a ,taunting tone of voice...
...That's where things go wrong...
...It is not finally the plot, the fiction, that each is trying to put across, but just a tour of a special territory we could not otherwise see...
...Nonetheless, they are, and their personalities prove remarkably like in the end...
...In fact, the endings themselves are very like in these two movies, each man pursuing his quarry so relentlessly that the quarry is driven to murder loved ones and commit suicide...
...The e:ho between the titles reassures us that the new film is, as Poirot himself would put it, /a m~me chose all over again...
...He has a comfortably avuncular relationship with them all...
...You would scarcely imagine that the two men are in the same line...
...John Collins lives in a very different world...
...Christie's characters make their way up the river on a luxury side-wheeler...
...I wish she would speak more slowly so I could catch what she was saying...
...Collins, on the other hand, learns something new not about the rest of the human race, but about "himself...
...In Skiptracer this territory is, to use the appropriate Dragnet terminology, the modus operandi of the title character...
...And there is even one character, Jacqueline de Bellefort (Mia Farrow), who is an attempt to bridge the gap between the murdermystery plot and the travelogue ambiance which distracts us from the dramatic poverty of all these rich people...
...When they murder each other, he sol~s the murders for them and clucks over their indiscretions and their passions...
...The Nile, and not just the river of geography, either, but the river of legend, the one that could exist only in colortial times when the British ruled Egypt and all was right with the world---~the river as a setting of picture-book beauty and mystery...
...The world in which Collins lives is a depressingly familiar one--the world of gimcrack merchandise, of things that were not worth owning in the first place, but for which the owners are now being made to sweat blood...
...Instead of the wit, wisdom and fine feeling with which Poirot surrounds his work, Collins performs his, of necessity, with ruthlessness and even a certain sadistic pleasure...
...The two endings are equally ludicrous...
...Skiptracer and Death on the Nile look very different...
...This is a world in which people are r of killing for the abstractions of money or power, but are also blas~ about the incredible luxury of their surroundings and their actual physical possessions...
...Wh!le people around Poirot are in:redibly casual about possessions of great value, those whom Collins sees are mining their lives in order to acquire junk that wears out before they can pay for it, Unlike Poirot, Collins knows no one...
...It needs to make this pavementpounding Pinocehio into a real boy, a live character with feelings and problems and a story all his own...
...But then the problem is how to dispose of this machine...
...In Poirot's case, as usual, this outcome only adds to what he knows about humanity...
...Poirot is of course Agatha Christie's famous detective of yesteryear...
...Although the particular deadbeat that he drives to murder-suicide makes him the top dollar man in his 13 October 1978:662 office, he is so broken up about it that he erases all the other names in his casebook from the computer, deepsixes their files, and walks out on his job, a free man at last...
...Quelle tra#die," he murmurs gently when the murder-suicide pact is carried out right before his eyes...
...This drives the honeymooners mad, and it drives me mad, too...
...If the hero were allowed truly to be himself, without fake endinks or diversions, the audience would walk out in disgust...
...The movie never lets its camera stray far from this background as Ms...
...I.n Death on the Nile the territory through which we are to get a guided tour is also revealed in the title...
...It was thus in Murder on the Orient Express, as it is in Death on the Nile...
...Where Death on the Nile is a fantasy of the past, Skiptracer takes place in the documentary present...
...Some of it, I suspect, is actually 16mm blown up to 35mm...
...Honestly, one finds these surly, ill-mannered guides everywhere one goes these ,days...
...It is out of curiosity about how a skiptracer works that we go to this film, and at first the film provides just this and nothing more--a hero who is a machine, a working model of how a dun operates...
...He is, according to the title of the film i.n which he appears, a Skiptracer, which is to say, a dun, a man who repossesses the property of deadbeats...
...In order to go someplace, to come to a climax and reach a conclusion, the film needs to try something more ambitious...
...The latter has been done in Panavision with diffused light and invariably soft, rich colors that seem to hang in the air...
...It is as if life were a play he watched from afar...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...David Petersen, who plays Collins, even looks rather like Webb, especially around the mouth...
...In the world in which he lives, everyone is a stranger to everyone else...
...Death even contrives to send them ashore for excursions, adventures and murder attempts in the Temple of Karnak or wherever...
...The truth is that with a character like Poirot or Collins, a movie has a no-win proposition...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 20
