ARABESQUE: Burnoose Notice

This post has been revised and republished  as part of the My Love of Old Hollywood Horseathon, hosted by Page, from May 25 through May 28, 2012. Saddle up, y'all!


After Stanley Donen’s Hitchcockian romantic comedy-thriller Charade (1963) became a smash hit, Donen had a decision to make: play it safe and make another film just like it (this was in the days before filmmakers sequel-ed popular films to death, lazily giving them titles like Hit Movie Part 2), or boldly go where he hadn’t gone before? Donen opted for a little of both with Arabesque (1966). Arabesque has just about everything a moviegoer could want in a fun escapist movie: spine-tingling suspense; international intrigue; delightful onscreen romantic chemistry between Oscar-winners Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren (though the Oscars they won weren't for Arabesque; Peck won his Best Actor Oscar for To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962, while Loren had won her Best Actress Oscar the previous year for Two Women); witty dialogue and sight gags; eye-catching English locations; jazzy Henry Mancini music with autoharps and mandolas providing exotic Middle Eastern-sounding motifs; inventive visuals with a pop art vibe; and the beguiling Sophia in fabulous Christian Dior frocks and footwear, courtesy of  the scene-stealing villain played by renowned character actor Alan Badel (Day of the Jackal; This Sporting Life; Children of the Damned) as our heroine's foot-fetishist sugar daddy! What’s not to love?

The eyes have it, and Prof. Ragheed's gonna get it!

If the delightful Charade was Alfred Hitchcock Lite, then Arabesque is Hitchcock Lite after taking a few classes in James Bond 101, including an opening title sequence by Maurice Binder, who also did the honors for Charade as well as for most of the Bond movies. Gregory Peck plays David Pollack, a hieroglyphics expert and Yank professor at Oxford who finds himself embroiled in Middle Eastern intrigue while decoding the MacGuffin, a cipher (which also happens to be the title of the Gordon Cotler novel which inspired the film, adapted for the silver screen by Julian Mitchell, Stanley Price and Pierre Marton. More about Marton shortly).

Our hero finds himself up against four Arabs who want to know what’s on that cipher:
* Prime Minister Jena (pronounced “Yay-na” and played by Carl Duering), who’s in England on a hush-hush mission;
*Nejim Beshraavi (Badel), the shipping magnate whose ships may be laid up for good if Jena signs a treaty promising to use English and American tankers;
*Yussef Kasim (Kieron Moore of Crack in the World fame, among others), whose penchant for then-hip lingo a la Edd “Kookie” Byrnes on 77 Sunset Strip belies his ruthlessness;
*And last but far from least, Beshraavi’s

In any language, nobody can resist Yasmin!

beautiful, unpredictable lover Yasmin Azir, played by the dazzling, hazel-eyed Loren. She’s sharp, witty, and alluring as all get out in her fabulous Dior wardrobe, including a beaded golden burnoose!

Kieron Moore reads the Arabesque script: "I talk like Kookie
and get knocked off how?!"

John Merivale, the character actor who put the "Adrian Messenger" in The List of Adrian Messenger is memorable as Sloane, Beshraavi’s put-upon henchman, who gets a memorably tense opening scene in a doctor’s office with hapless Dr. Ragheed (George Coulouris of Citizen Kane; Murder on the Orient Express; Papillon) and is treated as a combination lackey and punching bag for the rest of the film. I almost—only almost—felt sorry for the guy. Anyway, some of David’s new associates have no qualms about stooping to murder, and soon the chase is on, with suspenseful scenes at the Hyde Park Zoo, Ascot, and a construction site. Our man David is subjected to truth serum and knockouts, and I don’t just mean the lovely Loren: “Everytime I listen to you, someone either hits me over the head or tries to vaccinate me.” Poor David doesn’t know where to turn, especially since he can never be sure whether he can trust the mercurial Yasmin.

The usual ever-so-slightly wooden note in Gregory Peck’s delivery is oddly effective as he tries to loosen up and deliver witticisms in the breezy style of Cary Grant, Donen’s business partner and original choice to play David Pollack. (Rumor has it Grant and Loren were romantically linked once upon a time; wonder if that’s why Grant didn’t take the role?) It helps that those witticisms were written by none other than

If the shoe fits, Beshraavi will have Yasmin wear it!

Charade alumnus Peter Stone under the nom de plume Pierre Marton. Peck may not be Mr. Glib, but he’s so inherently likable (he won his Oscar for playing Atticus Finch, after all. Ask Vinnie, my husband, to do his Gregory-Peck-Impersonating-Cary-Grant impersonation sometime!) and seems so delighted to get an opportunity to deliver bon mots after all his serious roles that he’s downright endearing, like a child trying out new words for the first time. Besides, the bewitching Loren can make any guy look suave and sexy. Badel, looking like a swarthy, polished Peter Sellers wearing cool shades, virtually steals his scenes as the suave-bordering-on-unctuous villain with a foot fetish. Shoe lovers will swoon over the scene with Badel outfitting Loren with a roomful of fancy footwear and a comically/suggestively long shoehorn.

Giddy-up, giddy-up, let's go! Let's vanquish a foe!

Speaking of things of beauty, Christopher Challis’s dazzling, inventive cinematography won him a BAFTA award (the British equivalent of the Oscars), and Christian Dior got a BAFTA nomination for Loren’s elegant costumes. The only thing that disappoints me about Arabesque is that director/producer Donen didn’t seem to like this sparkling, twist-filled adventure as much as our family and so many other movie lovers do. Specifically, he felt the script needed work. In Stephen M. Silverman’s book about Donen’s films, Dancing on the Ceiling, Donen is quoted as saying about Arabesque, “We have to make it so interesting visually that no one will think about it.” Boy, did they ever! In an article about Arabesque on the TCM Web site, Stone had 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.” I don’t think Donen gave himself or the movie enough credit, though. If you ask me, Arabesque is a perfect example of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best-known quotes: “Some films are slices of life; mine are slices of cake.” Now that Arabesque is finally available on DVD (my own copy is part of Universal’s Gregory Peck Film Collection, a seven-disc DVD set that Vin bought me for Christmas 2011), I wish someone would get Donen and Loren together to do the kind of entertaining, informative commentary Donen did with the late Stone for Criterion’s special-edition Charade DVD, while they’re both still alive and well enough to swap stories, or perhaps even put out a whole new deluxe edition of the film!

Our heroes saddle up for action! Nice horsies!

At Ascot, that's the ticket - to frame our man David Pollock for murder!

Reflections in two sexy spies! (Great F/X work!)

Odd, I don’t usually get hieroglyphics in my fortune cookies!

Double-cross Beshraavi, and you’re in for a date with the falcon—
and we don’t mean George Sanders!

Now that's what I call breakfast in bed!

CHARADE: Wish I'd Gotten to Know Him Before I Fell in Love

“I wish I’d gotten to know her before I fell in love...I could say who’s to blame, say who’s the man in this cautionary tale...."  (From "Out of Jail" by They Might Be Giants)  I’ve always affectionately joked that Charade was the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made, as those who know me well can attest. Brimming with piquant romance, sophisticated comedy, and stylish suspense—including a soupçon of graphic-for-its-era violence and gore—Stanley Donen’s 1963 romantic comedy-thriller is a thoroughly entertaining object lesson in why it’s so important for people to really get to know their sweeties before marrying them. Case in point: Charade’s heroine Regina “Reggie” Lampert (Audrey Hepburn). Reggie, a beautiful young American simultaneous translator in Paris, quit her job at E.U.R.E.S.C.O. after marrying the rich and mysterious Charles Lampert—but he’s turning out to be too mysterious for comfort. When we meet Reggie, she’s vacationing in Megeve’s lovely French Alps resort, but it’s no pleasure trip. She’s suffering from buyer’s remorse — or more accurately, bridal remorse — and seriously contemplating divorce. As she sadly admits to her friend Sylvie (Dominique Minot), “I’ve tried to make it work, really I have.…But with Charles, everything is secrecy and lies. He’s hiding something from me, Sylvie, something terrible — and it frightens me.” Witty byplay with a handsome older gent who introduces himself as Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) perks things up before Reggie returns home to Paris. 

Reggie in disguise, with glasses!

But her homecoming is a rude awakening: Reggie is utterly gobsmacked to find their apartment is completely bare, and Charles has been murdered! On top of that, three men unknown to her turn up at Charles’s very sparsely-attended funeral. One of them, Tex Penthollow (James Coburn), holds a mirror to Charles’s open casket to see if he’s breathing. The second, Leopold W. Gideon (Ned Glass, who also played opposite Grant in North by Northwest as the suspicious Grand Central Terminal ticket agent) sneezes violently over Charles’s casket. (Sylvie dryly notes, “He must have known Charles pretty well…he’s allergic to him.”) The third mourner is an angry, imposing fella named Herman Scobie (George Kennedy) with a bad attitude and a metal prosthetic claw. He storms into the church and confirms Charles’s deceased state by plunging a pin into his corpse, to the shock of both Reggie and Sylvie.  

Reggie's a Truthful Whitefoot, with a white dress to match!

"Is this the party to whom I am speaking?"

With oranges like these, who needs apples?

Turns out Charles was living a double life—a quadruple life, really, considering he had 4 passports under 4 different names. But that’s only the beginning; self-described American Embassy “desk jockey” Hamilton Bartholomew (Walter Matthau) reveals that Charles was a wanted man! He and the other “mourners” had fought in World War 2 together, going behind enemy lines to deliver $250,000 in gold to the French underground. Instead, they stole the gold but got ambushed by the Nazis, which is how Scobie got a claw where his hand used to be. Charles escaped with the $250 grand and had managed to elude his former comrades until now. The bewildered, vulnerable yet determined Reggie is the gang’s only lead, if they don’t get fed up and kill her first. There’s one scene where Tex corners Reggie in a phone booth at the Black Sheep Club (oranges never looked so sexy or funny!), torturing our hapless heroine by dropping lit matches on her dress as she brushes them off, screaming and sobbing. It’s always made me want to write a scene (if someone hasn’t beat me to it) in which the heroine has just enough room to knee her tormentor in the groin, snapping, “I saw that movie, too!” Peter catches up with Reggie in Paris and offers to help her out with the fix she’s in. His playful hard-to-get routine is catnip to her, and she’s falling in love…until she finds out the guy has as many aliases as Charles did. Boy, Reggie sure can pick ’em!  Bartholomew wants to take advantage of Reggie’s mystery man by encouraging her to play nice with Peter — or is it Alex? Adam? — and see what he’s up to. Who can she trust, and how can she keep all those names straight? Her life becomes a case of “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” as the crooks and Peter/Alex/Adam/Whatever His Name Is moves into Reggie’s small hotel, where comedy, suspense, murder, and paranoid gallows humor also set up light housekeeping.

Charade is the movie that made me a fan of both Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone. In fact, I actually saw Charade long before I ever saw any of Donen’s classic musicals. He has fun with Charade’s Hitchcockian aspects, such as the clever corpse-eye-view shot involving a morgue drawer. Every other line of Stone’s screenplay is sparklingly quotable, and Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn are among my favorite screen couples. It’s a pity they didn’t have more opportunities to team up onscreen together during their long careers. My family and I have always loved the wry way that Grant, then 59, and Hepburn, then 34, kidded the age difference between them. That was more or less Grant’s idea, according to Donen and Stone on the superb Criterion Collection DVD’s delightful, anecdote-rich commentary track. Grant was concerned that it would be unseemly for a man his age to be chasing a beautiful woman so much younger than him, so he convinced the filmmakers to make Hepburn’s character the romantic aggressor. Personally, I found this gambit to be quite charming, and it makes sense for Reggie’s trusting, romantic, impulsive personality. 

Will Reggie and Peter/Alex/Adam
live happily and frivolously ever after?

In fact, Audrey Hepburn had the most remarkable knack for being glamorous yet approachable; she was one of the most endearing glamour-pusses in movie history. James Coburn, George Kennedy, and Walter Matthau are in top form in their early pre-Oscar screen roles. Both Hepburn and Paris look their sophisticated best here; let’s face it, Audrey was born to wear Givenchy!  Charade’s driving opening theme is my favorite piece of Henry Mancini music (the Pink Panther theme comes a very close second). In fact, the whole score reflects the film’s many moods perfectly. Without giving too much away, I love the clever MacGuffin, too; those who aren’t as into philately as my stepdad may have a new respect for stamp-collecting after watching Charade!