Having just watched the mess of a 2022 film of the same name I thought I would go back and see what this 1978 version was like.

It is much better and follows more closely the original plot.

SPOILERS. Another one of those somewhat claustrophobic Agatha Christie suspensers but a very well-done example of same. Wouldn't we all like to take a trip down the Nile on a paddle-wheeler? (The Egyptian kids run alongside on the river bank, waving and shouting at the boat, making Bette Davis smile -- until they pull down their pants and moon her.)

She's quite good, Bette Davis. So is everyone else. They seem to fit into their parts almost as well as the characters in "The Maltese Falcon." Lois Childes isn't much of an actress, true. She has an accent that is straight out of the San Fernando Valley. ("I don't like being compared to a ba-bewn." That last vowel, if it were in German, would demand an umlaut.) But she is positively juicy looking. What a sinuous back!

The usual unsavory or suspicious characters are aboard, all of them done very well. The best, perhaps, is Angela Lansbury. She is absolutely outstanding as a sex-crazed novelist, caressing the stone rams along the road, lauding "their ruttish nature." Her wardrobe deserves some kind of prize for its outrageousness -- she wears fuzzy turbans, her eyes are circled with black like a lemur's, and she wears what appears to be a long ton of beads which droop in festoons down to her belly button. And her acting is priceless. Half drunk all the time and all drunk half the time, she bats those awning-sized eyelashes, rolls her eyes at the overhead, practically swoons with self-love, and is utterly magnetic. She comes on like a woman out of Aubrey Beardsley, a treat to watch and to listen to. Everyone else seems human by comparison.

The mystery makes sense. The plot is easy to follow. The characters are supposed to be quirky -- and they are. Excellent use is made of locations, mainly the ruins at Luxor, south of Cairo.

There is a stunning scene of Childs and her husband racing across the desert on two Arabian horses that can't be beaten, not even by Ben Johnson in a Ford western. Nino Rota has written one of those orchestral scores called "epic," and for this scene he slyly quotes from Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries."

The film has no ambition to be anything other than what it is, Gott sei dank. Watch it if you have the chance.