‘Arabesque‘ (1966) was produced and directed by Stanley Donen for Universal studios, but it belongs to the director’s ‘English period’, i.e. the decade in which Donen crossed the Atlantic the opposite way to that of Hitchcock and settled in England (following his third wife, Countess Adelle Beatty). The 60s were the years of cultural revolution in music, literature, cinema, and England and London in particular was one of the hotspots of these revolutions. During this period, he did not make any musical films, but instead created, among other, two action films that are somewhere between Hitchcock’s films of the late 1950s and the James Bond film series which had started in 1962. ‘Arabesque‘ is the second film in this Donen diptych, the producers building on the public and critical success of ‘Charade’ which had been released three years earlier. The success was moderate. The film succeeded at the box office, but one could feel the fatigue and some repetition. Reasons why spectators bought tickets in 1966 remain valid now.
The story in the film (bringing to screen a novel by Gordon Cotler, an American journalist and novelist) is more of a pretext. The main character named David Pollock is an American professor who teaches at Oxford, an expert on ancient civilizations and especially on their writing. After a colleague of his is assassinated, Pollock is recruited (with unconventional methods) to decipher a message that a group of political conspirators have to write in … the Hittite language. It’s the first curiosity in a long chain of details that make the full story implausible, but what does it matter? The character of the distracted scientist who turns into a survivor, even an action hero, was not exactly new even in 1966, when the role was given to Gregory Peck, and he would have many illustrious successors, Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones and Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon being just two of them. Here also a large part of the motivation is a fascinating female presence, which in ‘Arabesque‘ is embodied in the beautiful and exotic shapes of Yasmin Azir, played by a Sophia Loren at the peak of her beauty and magnetism.
I admit that I could not follow the complicated intrigue of espionage with political implications, but I think that happened to many viewers. It is clear that our professor is the good guy, and it is also clear who the bad guy are (almost everybody else). The main question is on what side is the mysterious Yasmin? ‘Charade’, made three years before, put at the center of the story a similar question but related to the identity of the lead male character. Here things are the other way around, and Sophia Loren‘s fascinating eyes are permanently hiding dangers and secrets. Several scenes are excellently shot (cinematography by Christopher Challis). One of them, filmed in a zoo, among mirrors and aquariums, is of anthology level. Henry Mancini‘s music is also very expressive and appropriate. A few other ideas are on the edge between action movies and their parodies. A great admirer of Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’, Stanley Donen includes a scene with a helicopter hunting the heroes in an ending that can also be considered a cinematic quote. In other scenes a huge building demolition machine or some mechanical monster it in a grain field are used as killing tools in chases and assassination attempts. Today’s viewer, with the experience of nearly 60 more years of screen action and horrors of all kind, can be amused by these scenes that may have originally been taken seriously by both the filmmakers and the audiences. The main source of entertainment and perhaps nostalgia is watching Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren surprisingly joining forces in a film with an unlikely story. Which, after all, is no little thing either.