Vitals

Roddy McDowall as Rex Brewster, flamboyant gossip columnist

Adriatic Sea, Summer 1939

Film: Evil Under the Sun
Release Date: March 5, 1982
Director: Guy Hamilton
Costume Designer: Anthony Powell

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Having returned from my own beach vacation this weekend, today’s post draws from a summery classic that was some of the earliest inspiration on my interest in men’s style: Guy Hamilton’s 1982 adaptation of the Agatha Christie mystery Evil Under the Sun.

This was the third Christie adaptation produced by John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin for EMI Films in less than a decade, beginning with Murder on the Orient Express (1974) which starred Albert Finney as eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Death on the Nile (1978) was the first to star Peter Ustinov, who became the first actor since Austin Trevor (in the 1930s) to play Poirot multiple times on screen when he first reprised the role in Evil Under the Sun. This movie feels considerably lighter than its predecessors in its tone and sun-baked setting, transferred from the novel’s provincial English coast to an exotic fictional island in the Adriatic Sea but filmed on Mallorca.

Principal characters like Poirot, the Redferns, and the Marshall family remained mostly unchanged in Anthony Shaffer’s screenplay, while others were either composited, jettisoned, or reimagined; for instance, the athletic spinster Emily Brewster from the novel was transformed into the extravagant Rex Brewster (Roddy McDowall), a gossip columnist writing an unauthorized tell-all biography of scandalous—and recently married—Broadway diva Arlena Stuart Marshall (Diana Rigg). Continue reading →