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Arabesque
Arabesque
	Theatrical release poster by Robert McGinnis
Directed by	Stanley Donen
Written by	Julian Mitchell; Stanley Price; Peter Stone; (as Pierre Marton)
Based on	The Cipher; 1961 novel; by Alex Gordon
Produced by	Stanley Donen
Starring	Gregory Peck; Sophia Loren
Cinematography	Christopher Challis
Edited by	Frederick Wilson
Music by	Henry Mancini
Production; company	Stanley Donen Enterprises
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release dates	May 5, 1966 (New York); May 24, 1966 (U.S.); July 28, 1966 (UK);
Running time	105 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$3.6 million
Box office	$5.8 million (est. US/ Canada rentals)

Arabesque is a 1966 American thriller spy film directed by Stanley Donen and starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, written by Julian Mitchell, Stanley Price, and Peter Stone based on The Cipher, a 1961 novel by Alex Gordon (pseudonym of Gordon Cotler [fr]^[4]). The film, along with Donen's immediately prior film Charade (1963), is usually described as being "Hitchcockian", as it features as a protagonist an innocent and ordinary man thrust into dangerous and extraordinary situations. It was the last film of that genre which Donen would make.^[5]

Arabesque was filmed in Technicolor and Panavision and was distributed by Universal Pictures.

Plot

Major Sloane kills Professor Ragheeb, an ancient hieroglyphics expert at Oxford University and steals a hieroglyph-encrypted message. Sloane then asks David Pollock, another professor working there, to meet with shipping magnate Nejim Beshraavi on a business matter. David, however, declines. He is later kidnapped by the prime minister of a Middle Eastern country, Hassan Jena and his ambassador to the United Kingdom, Mohammed Lufti. Jena makes David accept Beshraavi's offer of employment.

Beshraavi wants to decode Ragheeb's message. He had Ragheeb killed and secretly plans to do the same to David once the latter deciphers it. Beshraavi's girlfriend Yasmin Azir manages to tells this to David before he can decode the note. Aided by Yasmin, David hides and wraps the cipher in a red candy. David is eventually forced to show himself and decides to seemingly abduct Yasmin. While they flee, he struggles with one of Beshraavi's henchmen, whom a man named Webster eventually kills. Webster then knocks David unconscious.

David awakes in the presence of Webster, Yasmin and another of Yasmin's boyfriends, Yussef Kassim, who is after the cipher. David says that Beshraavi has the cipher. They use truth serum on David, who talks what they believe is gibberish about the candy. Believing that he was telling the truth about Beshraavi, Yussef tells Yasmin to work on Beshraavi.

The next morning, Yasmin tells Beshraavi that Yussef, for whom the cipher was originally intended, killed David and the henchman but does not yet know the coded message. Beshraavi says that David has the cipher. Later, Yasmin visits David. Yasmin convinces him that she hates Yussef and that she pretends to help him because his boss Ali, a general orchestrating a military takeover, has her mother and sisters hostage. Yasmin says that David needs to crack the cipher so she can report back to the embassy, which will ensure their safety.

David and Yasmin go to the construction site Yussef uses as his front. Nearby, Webster takes the candies to eat and discovers the cipher. David and Yasmin later overhear Webster and Beshraavi planning to meet at the Ascot racetrack to betray Yussef.

At the Ascot racetrack, Yasmin is with Beshraavi. Meanwhile, David spots Webster rendezvousing with Sloane, who hands over an envelope of money. David steals the cipher from Webster, who fights back. Sloane attempts to stab David, accidentally killing Webster.

David later notices newspaper headlines which implicate him as Webster's killer. David visits Mrs. Ragheeb and asks her about the cipher, also giving her the news that her husband has been killed. Mrs. Ragheeb revals that Yasmin is lying, in that she has no mother or sisters. Yasmin's father is actually Ali.

That night, David lies to Yasmin, saying that he does not have the cipher but has decoded the message and makes up a nonsense meaning. She relays that information to the embassy via telephone. Later, David secretly follows Yasmin to Yussef's construction site. There, Yussef attempts to kill Yasmin. David rushes to save her and Yussef is electrocuted to death by a live wire.

The hieroglyphics turn out to be a version of a nursery rhyme.^[a] David looks for secret writing on it. After getting it wet, the ink washes away, leaving a microdot. It reads "Beshraavi plans assassinate Jena twelve thirty June eighteenth" which is in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, Jena lands at the airport. David shoves past security guards to reach Jena, who is beginning a welcoming speech. David knocks Jena to the ground, saving him from Sloane's machine gun fire. Lufti then kills Jena with a pistol. However, the man who was shot later turns out to be an imposter of Jena.

The real Jena was abducted by Beshraavi and locked in the back of a truck. David and Yasmin hide in the truck and free Jena as the van arrives at Beshraavi's country estate. David, Yasmin and Jena escape on horses from his stables, being pursued through crop fields by a farm combine with blades. Beshraavi and Sloane approach them in a helicopter. While crossing the disused Crumlin steel-girder railway viaduct, David drops a ladder down into the helicopter's rotors as Beshraavi and Sloane pass underneath, causing them to crash and burn.

Cast

Gregory Peck as Prof. David Pollock
Sophia Loren as Yasmin Azir
Alan Badel as Nejim Beshraavi
Kieron Moore as Yussef Kasim
Carl Duering as Prime Minister Hassan Jena
John Merivale as Maj. Sylvester Pennington Sloane
Duncan Lamont as Kyle Webster
George Coulouris as Ragheeb
Ernest Clark as Beauchamp
Harold Kasket as Mohammed Lufti
Gordon Griffin as Fanshaw

Production

The original working title for the film was "Crisscross", which was later changed to "Cipher" before becoming Arabesque.^[5]

Producer/director Stanley Donen wanted Cary Grant for the role of Pollock after working with him in his previous film Charade, and the dialogue for Pollock was written with Grant in mind. However, Donen was later quoted as saying,

[Grant] didn't want to be in it ... It wasn't a good script and I didn't want to make it, but Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, whom I loved, wanted to be in it and the studio implored me to make it, because, they said, 'It's ridiculous not to make a film with Peck and Sophia.' They said it would make money, and they were right.^[6]

Donen later estimated that $400,000 was spent on the script alone and cinematographer Christopher Challis recalled that the film went through several rewrites.^[2] Challis said that "The more the script was rewritten, the worse it got."^[6] With Peck and Loren already contracted to do the film, Challis recalled that Donen told him "Our only hope is to make it so visually exciting the audience will never have time to work out what the hell is going on".^[7]

Peter Stone, who was brought in very late to make improvements in the dialogue, said that Donen "shot it better than he ever shot any picture. Everything was shot as though it were a reflection in a Rolls-Royce headlamp."^[5] Donen described his technique in shooting the film:

I had hoped to avoid any sign of the studio manner this time, so I tried something like the "living camera" technique. The hand-held camera had been used a lot lately, especially in Europe, but the trouble had been too much wobble because the operator has to carry the sheer weight of the camera while he's working. One of our boys had the idea of suspending the camera ... to give the operator all the mobility of the hand camera without the weight ... Arabesque is sort of going to the extreme until it almost makes you sick. Granted, we did do some interesting photographic things.^[8]

Peck said about Donen that

Stanley had a terrific instinct, like a choreographer, which, of course, he had been.^[b] But even in an ordinary dramatic sequence he'd use the body to punctuate what was happening — standing, relaxing, everything, it was all choreographed. If you look at the picture, we were always moving, because Stanley just wanted to keep the ball in the air the entire time, and he used every camera trick you could think of. He also loved filming Sophia's decolletage and her rear end.^[6]

As with Donen's Charade, Henry Mancini composed the score and Maurice Binder designed the main titles.

Sophia Loren's request for 20 different pair of shoes for her character led to her lover in the film being described as having a foot fetish.^[5] In a chase scene Peck, who had been injured years earlier in a horse-riding accident, could not run fast enough to keep up with Loren, who kept pulling ahead. Peck implored his co-star to run slower, reminding her that he was supposed to be rescuing her, but Loren asked Donen to make Peck run faster. Since Peck was in pain, Donen had to persuade Loren to run slower to make filming the scene possible.^[9]

Many internal and external scenes were shot at Tyringham Hall in Buckinghamshire. At the time the building was a disaster recovery site owned by the ANZ Banking Group and was largely unused and unfurnished. The railway bridge action scene was filmed on the historic Crumlin Viaduct in Crumlin, Ebbw Vale, which was being dismantled at the time.

Loren's character drove a Mercedes-Benz 230SL. The Rolls-Royce Phantom IV which appears in the film was originally owned by Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester - it is one of only eighteen Phantom IV examples ever built.

Reception

Arabesque received mixed to positive reviews from critics and audiences, earning a 74% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was a box office success.^[5] Boxoffice Magazine called it "a spy adventure par excellence" and wrote that it was "in the best Alfred Hitchcock vein and ranks among the year's best."^[10] Variety wrote, "Arabesque packs certain salable ingredients...but...fault lies in a shadowy plot line and confusing characters, particularly in the miscasting of Peck in a cute role."^[11]

Awards and nominations

Award	Category	Subject	Result
BAFTA Film Awards	Best Cinematography	Christopher Challis	Won
	Best Costume Design	Christian Dior	Nominated
	Best Editing	Frederick Wilson	Nominated
Bambi Award	Best Actress	Sophia Loren	Won
Grammy Award	Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Show	Henry Mancini	Nominated
Laurel Award	Best Action Sequence	Gregory Peck	5th Place

Notes

^ More specifically, "Goosey Goosey Gander".
^ Donen had started his film career as the co-director and co-choreographer of Gene Kelly, with whom he had worked on Broadway.

References

^ Arabesque at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
^ ^a ^b Alexander Walker (1974) Hollywood, England, Stein and Day. p.341
^ Staff (January 4, 1967) "Big Rental Pictures of 1966", Variety p.8
^
* "Writer Gordon Cotler dies at 89". Variety.com. 23 January 2013. Retrieved 14 October 2024.
- Gordon Cotler – The New Yorker
- site:classic.esquire.com/article/ "Gordon Cotler"
- "The New York Times" "By Gordon Cotler"
- Gordon Cotler - The Atlantic
- Gordon Cotler - Kirkus Reviews
- Gordon Cotler – Publishers Weekly
- Gordon Cotler - FictionDB
- Gordon Cotler – IBDB
- Gordon Cotler (Writer) - Playbill
- Gordon Cotler - Rotten Tomatoes
- Gordon Cotler – Filmaffinity
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Stafford, Jeff (ndg) "Arabesque (1966)" TCM.com
^ ^a ^b ^c Silverman, Stepohen M. (1996) Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0679414126 quoted in Stafford, Jeff (ndg) "Arabesque (1966)" TCM.com
^ Challis, Christopher (1995) Are They Really So Awful?: A Cameraman's Chronicles. London: Janus Publishing. p.176 ISBN 1857561937
^ Casper, Joseph Andrew (1983) Stanley Donen. Metchuen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0810816156 quoted in Stafford, Jeff (ndg) "Arabesque (1966)" TCM.com
^ Harris, Warren G. (1998) Sophia Loren: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684802732 quoted in Stafford, Jeff (ndg) "Arabesque (1966)" TCM.com
^ "Feature Reviews: Arabesque". Boxoffice. Vol. 89, no. 3. New York. May 9, 1966. pp. a11. ProQuest 1705225835.
^ "Film Reviews: Arabesque". Variety. Vol. 242, no. 11. May 4, 1966. p. 6. ProQuest 1017129987. Retrieved August 29, 2022.