Death on the Nile

The O.J. phony frame-up alibi offered in The Thumps might sound familiar to you. If so, it could be because you saw the 1978 film version of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile with Peter Ustinov as her Belgian counterpart to Sherlock Holms, Hercule Poirot. To see the connection you might also have to do what Fuhrman said he pretended to do as a composite character he created for a screenplay on the McKinny tapes. You have to take a little of this and a little of that from different sources and reconfigure them the way he did in his Murder in Greenwich movie.  

He managed to get both bloody gloves into his movie with a front page newspaper photo of O.J. holding them up in court. He used the number 22 four times, twice unnecessarily and once inaccurately. He referred to the Skakels as “Kennedys.” He borrowed enough from so many identifiable movie and TV sources to write a book with scores of pictures and relevant quotes that spill into many more Picture Gallery pages.

The thumps theory has a noteworthy difference. It takes the pieces that make it up from only one movie set mainly in the Egypt of the late 1930s. You need to do little more than substitute “gloves” for “guns” and “thumps” for “shots” to assemble the entire phony alibi scenario. Even those elements come mostly from parts of Death on the Nile grafted onto other parts with minor tweaks to relate them to O.J., the gloves and the thumps.

For starters, Death on the Nile involves a love triangle, a betrayal, a staged fight, a bleeding killer, a missing murder weapon, a clever time shifting trick, and killers planting evidence to make it appear that someone else framed one of them.

In the first scene you see a limo driver wearing black leather gauntlets (gloves). In another scene, the great detective Hercule Poirot wears white linen gloves. You don’t get three bangs on a wall or a killer’s brown leather gloves on a narrow passageway outside a bungalow wall. You do get three shots from the same murder weapon, another planted murder weapon, a large caliber revolver dropped on a narrow deck of a steam ship outside of a killer’s passenger cabin. The actor in the role of the shady American lawyer whose stolen gun gets planted on deck is George Kennedy, O.J.’s boss in The Naked Gun (1988). The Naked Gun 2 ½ (1991) and The Naked Gun 33 ¹/₃ (1994).

Early in Death on the Nile, one of the many suspects on the Egyptian steam ship Karnak makes a prophetic gesture that combines what is going to happen to a wealthy British woman and her maid. He runs his reading glasses across his throat to symbolize slashing the wealthy British woman’s throat. Later in the movies someone shoots her in the temple with a .22 caliber Derringer. After that, someone slashes the maid’s throat.   

Mia Farrow (MF) as Jackie and Simon MacCorkindale as Simon Doyle were engaged to be married before Lois Chiles as Jackie’s best friend Linnet dazzles Simon with her fabulous wealth and marries him. Simon quickly regrets having left Jackie for Linnet.  He and Jackie still love each other. They hate Linnet and want her money. They end up killing her and two other women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jackie creates a motive for killing Simon and Linnet Doyle by openly stalking and harassing them in the most outrageous places on their honeymoon in Egypt. It’s part of a plan to make it appear that someone is trying to frame Jackie when someone discovers Linnet’s dead body.

The passengers aboard the honeymooner’s ship include an armchair revolutionary, a German doctor, an alcoholic novelist and her daughter, a crooked lawyer, a rich American widow obsessed with Linnets pearls and her paid British companion/nurse. All of them have motives to kill Linnet and from the evidence left by the people who do kill her, Poirot is able to devise credible guilt scenarios for all of them. He can’t do it for Simon or Jackie because they seem to have unassailable alibis.

Simon and Jackie stage a verbal fight in the ship’s saloon that seems to escalate to physical violence.  Jackie pulls her four-chamber .22-caliber Derringer from her purse and appears to shoot him in front of a startled witness while, in fact, Jackie fired the bullet into a nearby wooden coffee table. Simon falls on the floor in front of a sofa, clutching his leg in apparent agony with a white handkerchief over a make believe wound. The red stain on his pant leg and the handkerchief is red ink. The sound of the shot brings another witness into the room.

Jackie, who flung the gun away from her, looks as devastated emotionally by what she did as Simon looks physically. He implores the witnesses to take Jackie away to calmer her down, to get the nurse (Maggie Smith) for her and the German doctor (Jack Warden) for him. He has the alibi of being unable to walk, much less run to the murder scene. She has the alibi of being closely watched and heavily sedated after tossing away her gun – with one spent round – in partial view of anyone who enters the saloon.

With the witnesses to his staged shooting gone, Simon has a small window of opportunity to kill Linnet. He takes off his shoes, retrieves the Derringer and scampers to his sleeping wife’s cabin on the other side of the ship. He puts the barrels of the gun close to her temple and fires the second round from Jackie’s gun. He dips her finger in her blood to write a “J” on the wall and runs back to the saloon. He does all of this in less than a minute without Poirot’s intervention because he or Jackie drugged Poirot’s wine to make him sleep through the commotion.

Lying on the sofa, Simon uses the fur stole to muffle the sound of the third spent round. He fires this bullet into his leg through the stole to muffle the sound and to give him a real .22- caliber bullet wound. He uses a fresh handkerchief to cover it.  He takes one spent round from the Derringer, tosses it through a porthole into the river and replaces it with a fresh round. He does this to guard against the unlikely event that the gun he’s going to throw into the river will be found. To minimize the chances of that happening, he puts the gun in the fur stole along with the ink-stained handkerchief, and a marble ashtray to weigh down all of the incriminating evidence.  

As in every real complex plan of action and believably fictional plans involving people who don’t always behave predictably, something goes wrong.

Three things go wrong.

The murder conspirators were right in anticipating that someone might find the gun and handkerchief wrapped in the stole. The ship’s Egyptian onboard manager supervises the search. He is wearing gloves when he gleefully hands the wet bundle to Poirot and his English friend Col. Race (David Niven).

No harm done unless the red stain on the handkerchief is checked for blood. Never mind fingerprints, which for some inscrutable reason are never addressed in the movie although the killers never wiped off anything and did not wear gloves.

Linnet’s maid who should have been in her quarters on the other side of the ship was walking on deck unable to sleep. She saw Simon enter his wife’s cabin. She heard the shot. She saw him run back down the narrow deck in his stocking feet.

She blackmails him in front of Poirot and Col. Race, using plausible deniability language that only Simon would recognize for what it is...  Big problem.

Simon gives Jackie the decoded message. First she takes a sharp knife from the German surgical case that he left in the saloon with Simon. She then goes to the maid’s cabin on the pretense of paying her off. When the maid is distracted by the money in her hand Jackie slits her throat from behind and puts the knife back where she got it.

The next murder/frame-up is also Jackie’s improvised work. Angela Lansbury as Salome Otterbourne, the dipsomaniacal novelist, sees Jackie leaving the maid’s cabin. When she hears of this murder she goes to the saloon where Poirot, Race and the doctor are gathered around Simon. When she announces that she knows who the killer is, Simon stalls her by insisting in a loud voice that she start from the beginning and tell everything.

Jackie’s cabin is on the other side of the wall. Simon’s loud talk is to alert her to the emergency. She gets the message, runs to the lawyer’s cabin and steals his revolver. She dashes back to the saloon. Standing outside the open door concealed by door curtains,   shoots Salome in the forehead, drops the smoking gun and darts into her cabin.

Poirot summons everyone to the saloon where he lays the evidence on the coffee table and reveals his solution to the murders. Somehow, the question of fingerprints never comes up. Instead, Poirot tricks the killers into admitting their guilt. It is an esoteric bluff that would not have worked if they had simply worn gloves. But, with Col. Race’s help, it does work. Seeing no way out, Jackie grabs the Derringer, shoots Simon in the head and turns the gun on herself... Bang! Two new dead bodies: a man’s and a woman’s.

The clincher for me in determining that Death on the Nile was the master template for an O.J. phony alibi theory intended to explain the thumps on Kato’s wall as well as matching bloody gloves goes back to the discovery of Jackie’s gun.

Rewind to the Egyptian ship manager wearing gloves while handing his wet bundle of evidence to Poirot and Race....

Race notes that the murder weapon is a four-barreled (four coins), .22-calibur (22 cents) Derringer (the type of weapon used to murder President Lincoln). Poirot notes that the red stain on the handkerchief has the water-soaked characteristics of red ink.

Rewind to Bette Davis as Marie Van Schuyler, the wealthy American widow, trying to describe to Poirot and Race the odd sound she heard from inside her cabin on the night that Linnet Doyle was murdered.

Van Schuyler: I was awakened by a popping sound.

Race: Popping sound?

Van Schuyler: Exactly. Like a Champagne cork coming out of a bottle. An indifferent Champagne, you understand, not a great vintage. That makes a much more discrete sound.

Race: Could it have been a small pistol shot rather than a Champagne cork?

Van Schuyler: Possibly.

This is all about the quality of sound and the force that produces it. You might recall that although four shots were fired on the ship at different times, the combined total of witnesses heard three shots. Squeezing the Death on the Nile shots that were heard into the same timeframe as the three thumps Kato reported on the other side of his wall makes a close parallel. The most important thing, though, is the guessing game, the inability of the witness to say what caused the sound on the other side of a wall.

Rewind from there to what Poirot says to Mrs. Van Schuyler that begins the string of events culminating in the discovery of the .22 and other incriminating evidence.

He says, “Your cabin is next to Mrs. Doyle?

She says, “It is.”

By the way, you can pick out the killer in two other movies based on Agatha Christie books, Murder Is Easy  and Murder She Said without following any of the clues. All you have to do is look for the character other than the chauffer wearing leather gloves.