arabesque

I didn’t like “Funny Face,” and “Charade” has problems of its own, so needless to say director
Stanley Donen isn’t on firm footing with me as a filmmaker. Therefore it came as little surprise to
me that “Arabesque” failed to dazzle me either. Donen just doesn’t grasp how to tell a story very
well.

Gregory Peck plays a professor steeped in the knowledge of Arab hieroglyphs. He is offered
$25,000 by a creepy dude, Beshraavi, who wants a scrap of hieroglyphics deciphered. If Peck
doesn’t take the offer, he is a dead man. He goes to work, only to meet Sophia Loren, playing
Beshraavi’s mistress. Peck learns from her that Beshraavi is a dangerous criminal and he
shouldn’t decipher the glyphs. Of course, Loren has intentions of her own and soon Peck doesn’t
know whom to trust.

This was supposed to be Donen’s follow-up caper to “Charade,” and in many respects he mimics
his previous film rather closely. There’s a psychedelic opening title sequence like his former movie
and exotic locales with chases and twists. The problems lie in the execution of the visuals and the
editing. It seems Donen became more interested in the aesthetics than the coherence of the story
and its telling.

The viewer is subjected to a number of weird scenes, the cake topper being the sequence in which
Peck is high on truth serum. He’s kicked out of a speeding van onto a busy highway in London
where he starts tripping out in a scene that looks like it was edited by a guy tripping on acid. Wait,
this was 1966, so acid use is somewhat likely. I don’t really care how much “truth” there is to the
effects of truth serum, seeing Peck singing like a child and riding a bicycle against freeway traffic is
surreal and zany.

The real issue with the film is the flow of the story. Like “Charade,” the movie falls victim to a few
logic traps and stylistic problems. Donen has this penchant for taking what should be a
suspenseful foreign espionage story and filling over half of it with cheeky moments that undercut
the story’s ability to be thrilling.

At the same time, the writing is such that Peck and Loren have no real chemistry and also get away
with things that normal people would never even conceive. For example, if you were standing right
next to someone who was suddenly shot in front of two hundred people, do you think you’d be able
to just duck out the door after easing the corpse to the floor? No. There’d be questioning by the
cops and all manner of other delays.

Peck, who later said he was uncomfortable making this movie, looks downright uncomfortable on
screen. Loren bats her eyes and seems to be on autopilot half the time. “Arabesque” makes a
passionate but fruitless attempt to be engaging and Donen’s affliction with “auteurism” mires the
film in needless visual and atmospheric complexity that hurts rather than helps.