ARABESQUE

I have to confess that I struggled to get through this 1966 comedy spy thriller, and my attention was increasingly going AWOL as it went on.

It’s directed by Stanley Donen as the follow-up to his successful effort in the same genre in 1963, ‘Charade’.  That film is set in Paris, stars Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, as well as a strong supporting cast, and has an entertaining plot.  Donen, who is best known as a director of musicals, was able to take these ingredients and make them into a charming soufflé of a film.

In the case of Arabesque the ingredients are less promising: Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, not much of a supporting cast, and a plot which most critics found confusing. The result for me was less a soufflé, more a rubbery omelette.

Cary Grant turned the project down which suggests he knows a bad script when he sees it.  He may also have wondered whether he would have made a convincing professor of Egyptology (spoiler alert: he wouldn't).  Although Gregory Peck is more professorial he lacks the comic timing required for the part, although to be fair the dialogue is so uninspired even Grant might have struggled with it.

There’s a cringy scene early on where Loren’s character is obliged to stand naked in a shower cubicle where Peck’s character is hiding (fully dressed).  Also not great are the plethora of white actors playing Arab characters, notable Alan Badel giving a bizarre performance as a Bond-like villain.

The influences of Bond and the Swinging Sixties are all over this film, with its predilection for strange camera angles and use of mirrors and lighting.  It looks great; I'm not sure grass has ever looked so green before.  Unfortunately that doesn't go anywhere near compensating for the poor dialogue and convoluted plot.

The odd interesting sequence jumps out of the general morass, such as a bad guy using a wrecking ball to good effect, the use of a combine harvester as a weapon, and a spectacular helicopter crash at the end.