In 1974, Albert Finney disappeared so completely into Hercule Poirot for Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express that the Academy handed him an Oscar nomination. It was a towering, theatrical performance — mannered, precise, and deliberately larger than life. Four years later, Peter Ustinov stepped into the same role for Death on the Nile and did something far more dangerous: he made Poirot feel human. Kino Lorber’s new 4K UHD arrives at a moment when Kenneth Branagh’s recent adaptations (in 2017, 2022, and 2023) have introduced a whole new generation to the character, which makes this the perfect time to show them what the gold standard actually looks like.

The cast alone justifies the price of admission, and what a cast it is. This was the kind of ensemble that could only exist when Old Hollywood’s legends still shared the screen with the next generation’s rising stars. Bette Davis (Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte) is magnificently abrasive as the kleptomaniac Mrs. Van Schuyler. Maggie Smith (Downton Abbey) delivers a sharp, knowing turn as her long-suffering companion Miss Bowers.

Angela Lansbury (Mary Poppins Returns) plays the boozy, overly enthusiastic novelist Salome Otterbourne with infectious relish. David Niven (The Guns of Navarone) brings effortless authority as Colonel Race. And right in the middle of all this Hollywood royalty sits Mia Farrow — daughter of director John Farrow and actress Maureen O’Sullivan — representing a kind of bridge between those eras, her Jacqueline de Bellefort seething with the wounded intensity that made her a star in Rosemary’s Baby a decade earlier.

The mystery itself is vintage Christie. Wealthy heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles, Moonraker) steals Jacqueline’s fiancé Simon Doyle (Simon MacCorkindale, JAWS 3-D) and marries him. Their honeymoon aboard an Egyptian paddle steamer puts them in close quarters with a shipful of suspects, and when someone acts on their motive, Ustinov’s Poirot sets about untangling a web of alibis so beautifully constructed you’ll want to rewatch the film immediately after the reveal just to see how Christie pulled it off.

Director John Guillermin, fresh off blockbuster duty with The Towering Inferno and King Kong, keeps the pacing tight for a 140-minute mystery and lets the Egyptian locations do the heavy lifting. Legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff spent seven weeks shooting on location, and the results are extraordinary — shots of the cast against the pyramids and along the Nile carry a grandeur that no soundstage could replicate. Nino Rota’s lush score adds romance and menace in equal measure, and Anthony Powell’s costumes earned a well-deserved Oscar.

Kino Lorber’s 4K presentation comes from a new scan of the 35mm original camera negative in Dolby Vision HDR, and the upgrade is significant. Cardiff’s cinematography has never looked this rich at home — the expanded color range brings out warm golds, deep blues, and fine detail in both the sun-drenched exteriors and the lamp-lit interiors of the Karnak. The disc includes an audio commentary from film historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson, vintage interviews with Ustinov and Jane Birkin, a making-of featurette, and the original trailer. It’s a package that does right by a film too many people have only ever seen cropped and color-faded on cable.

If you’ve only experienced the Branagh adaptations, this is the corrective. If you remember Finney’s Orient Express as the definitive Poirot, this might change your mind. Ustinov understood something essential about the character: vanity is only entertaining when humanity is right there beside it. This is Poirot at his most alive, in a film that earns every ounce of its grandeur.