Screen:

...The Mirror Crack'd is an over-upholstered Rolls Royce of a movie going about ten miles an hour...

...The answer to that question remains a mystery...

...But Donner works instead in the contemporary tradition of the over-produced dud like 1941 or The Blues Brothers...

...In between these two mishaps there are a great many others, unexplained murders of the sort that usually clutter up an Agatha Christie plot...

...The roles played by its aging stars, Novak and Taylor, are those of...

...But no, as both director and scriptwriter Byrum, tempted no doubt by the vulgarities of the Robin Cook novel on which his film is based, becomes preoccupied with the romance between Erica and Hassam...

...Fast as she flees, though, she beat me only by a step as I headed for the doors of the theater...

...The purpose of these detours into the past is to lend the allure of the occult to an ancient effigy and a papyrus inscription discovered by present-day archaelogist Erica Baron (Leslie Anne Downs...

...Screen PAR FOR THE CURSE JUMBLING THE MUMBO IN adapting Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd to the screen, director Guy Hamilton and scriptwriters Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandier apparently think they've made a comedy...

...In one regard, however, the film is, if not funny, at least realistic...

...But in this revival, the old arch detective of the thirties, the great sleuth from the land of ancestor worship and filial piety, is done in by an oedipus complex...

...When Lee walks down a Chinatown street in San Francisco, where the film is set, he obliviously leaves overturned vegetable stands, collapsed awnings, and shattered plate glass windows in his wake...

...Unfortunately, the victims of these developments tend to be younger members of the cast - Geraldine Chaplin, for instance - who might have given this film a little life...

...But in truth what director Give Donner and scriptwriters Stan Burns and David Axelrod have made their movie about is the klutziness itself...

...At the end Erica is seen running from the gateway that marks the entrance to the Valley of the Kings...

...A movie which let Peter Ustinov take a crack at the droll, talky, low-budget tradition of the Chan series from the thirties would have been worth seeing...

...Richard Hatch...

...aging movie stars...

...Oedipal revenge is the only motive that can account for the upstaging Chan gets in this movie from his "number one" grandson, Lee Chan, Jr...

...Somehow Lee manages to up-end everybody in his family from his grandmother (Lee Grant) to his hapless fiancee (Michelle Pfeiffer...

...The emotion is always the most transparently hokey part of this kind of potboiler anyway, and here it has the added disadvantage of causing the filmmaker to lose track of the action and intrigue...

...While I might have liked seeing less of Novak, Hudson, Taylor, et al...

...It's the creaking of the actors' bones...

...This may explain why Taylor and Novak thought they could handle their parts in this movie, but what made Lansbury think that she could do anything other than suffer by comparison to Margaret Rutherford's spry, definitive performance as Miss Marple in the Christie adaptations done twenty years ago...

...Tony Curtis, Kim Novak, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor - were on our way to a funeral together...

...John Byrum's Sphinx also begins with an ancient curse, a flashback to ancient Egypt in which a tombolari who is about to be quartered by four wild horses curses the architept of the pyramids...

...The Charlie Chan revival is just a background - little more than a pretext, really - for a lot of pointless, unfunny slapstick caused by the inept Lee...

...Grandma also occasions some of the pratfalls that fall flat in this film...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.ESTERBECK, JR...

...In attempting to escape a ring of antiquities smugglers who are also after these artifacts, Erica gets involved with a state security officer named Hassam (Frank Langella...

...Sphinx follows this up with several other flashbacks to both the life of this architect and the unsealing of King Tut's tomb in the 1920s by archaeologist Howard Carter, and in so doing the movie indulges in some tomb-robbing of its own, from The Exorcist...

...The action gets under way, about ten minutes after the film' begins, when Miss Marple (Lansbury) gets tangled up in a dog's leash, takes a nasty spill, and breaks her ankle...

...At that speed, the loudest sound you can hear is certainly not laughter, nor even the ticking of the clock...

...The consequence is that all the mumbo jumbo about ancient Egypt is buried beneath the mumble-jumble of a story in which we can't understand half the time what people are talking about or why they do what they do...

...Like the number one son in the original Charlie Chan movies, this grandson is a klutz supposedly in need of instruction from Charlie...

...If he rushes to the scene of a murder on a pier, all the reporters and TV cameramen end up in the bay as a result of his arrival...

...Clumsiness, rather than Charlie's wittiness, was obviously the dominant gene in the union of his family with hers...

...Since this film is intended as a real thriller rather than a spoof like The Mirror Crack'd and Charlie Chan, it only needs to tend to its plot to provide at least the sort of light entertainment Agatha Christie does when read straight...

...The film ends with Marina Rudd (Taylor) lying down to die in a grand and decorative manner like a diva at the conclusion of some interminable opera...

...If he chases the Dragon Lady (Angie Dickinson), he leads the city's police chief (Brian Keith) into collisions with half the patrol cars on his force...

...in The Mirror Crack'd, I was hoping to see more of Peter Ustinov in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen...

...The mystery involves an American film production that goes on location in an English village...

...But at the pace at which their film moves, I felt more as if I and its cast of aging superstars - Angela Lansbury...

...In Donner's film Charlie's relationship with the Dragon Lady is established through a black and white flashback to the 1930s, a campy scene in which Charlie reveals her as a murderess and she swears revenge on him and all his heirs...