Arabesque (1966 film)

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Arabesque
Arabesqueposter.jpg
Directed by Stanley Donen
Produced by Stanley Donen
Denis Holt
Written by Julian Mitchell
Stanley Price
Peter Stone (as Pierre Marton)
Based on The Cypher
1961 novel
by Gordon Cotler
Starring Gregory Peck
Sophia Loren
Alan Badel
John Merivale
Harold Kasket
Music by Henry Mancini
Cinematography Christopher Challis
Edited by Frederick Wilson
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release dates
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  • May 5, 1966 (1966-05-05) (U.S.)
  • July 28, 1966 (1966-07-28) (UK)
Running time
 105 minutes
Country the United States
Language English
Budget $4.8 million[1]
Box office $5 million (est. US/ Canada rentals)[2]

Arabesque is a 1966 Technicolor thriller starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren filmed in Panavision. The film is based on Gordon Cotler's novel The Cypher and directed by Stanley Donen.

Plot

Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. In an undercover mission, Sloane (John Merivale), posing as an eye doctor, kills Oxford University Professor Ragheeb (George Coulouris), an ancient hieroglyphics expert. Sloane steals a hieroglyph-encrypted message Ragheeb wrote and concealed within his glasses.

Professor David Pollock (Gregory Peck), an American, has taken over an absent Professor Ragheeb’s class on ancient hieroglyphics. Sloane, working on behalf of Middle Eastern shipping magnate Nejim Beshraavi (Alan Badel), asks David to meet with his boss on a business matter;. David declines but changes his mind after being forced to enter the Rolls-Royce Phantom IV, where he meets Middle Eastern Prime Minister Hassan Jena (Carl Duering), who David deeply admires, and Mohammed Lufti (Harold Kasket), Jena’s ambassador to Great Britain. Jena asks David to take Beshraavi’s job to discover what he is up to.

File:Rolls-Royce Phantom IV, 4AF10.jpg
The rare Rolls-Royce Phantom IV featured in the film.

David meets Beshraavi in a house in London. Beshraavi asks David to decode a Hittite inscription – the piece of paper Sloane stole. The house belongs to Beshraavi’s girlfriend Yasmin Azir (Sophia Loren), to whom David is immediately attracted.

Beshraavi, Yasmin, David, and an English businessman named Beauchamp (Ernest Clark) are having dinner. Yasmin slips David a note. He meets with Yasmin in her ensuite after reading the paper, which is a news clipping of Ragheeb’s death. Yasmin tells David that Beshraavi had Ragheeb killed and will do the same to David once he decodes the cipher. Their conversation is interrupted by Beshraavi. David keeps hidden until Sloane brings it to Beshraavi's attention that David and the cipher are missing. Overhearing the conversation, David wraps the cipher in a candy in his pocket, among others, a red one with the number “9.” As Beshraavi’s men search for David, Beshraavi demonstrates to one of Yasmin’s employees, Hemsley (Jimmy Gardner), that he can buy people for their loyalty or else exact extreme revenge. Forced to show himself, David seemingly abducts Yasmin. They flee from one of Beshraavi’s henchmen, Mustapha (Larry Taylor). In the course of the chase, Mustapha and David struggle at the zoological gardens, when another man intervenes and kills Mustapha. He identifies himself as Inspector Webster (Duncan Lamont) with CID. When a guard approaches, Webster kills him before revealing that he is working with Yasmin. Webster knocks David unconscious.

David awakes in a moving panel van in the presence of Webster, Yasmin, and another of Yasmin’s boyfriends, Yussef Kassim (Kieron Moore), who is looking for the cipher. David, seeing the bag of candies on a shelf in the van, tells Yussef that Beshraavi has the cipher. They use truth serum on David, after which he talks what they believe is gibberish about the number “9”. Believing that he was telling the truth about Beshraavi, Yussef tells Yasmin to work on Beshraavi while they throw David out of the vehicle.

The next morning, Yasmin arrives home and tells Beshraavi that Yussef, for whom the cipher was originally intended, killed David and Mustapha but does not yet know the coded message. While Yasmin believes Beshraavi has the cipher, Beshraavi states that David must still have it. Later, Yasmin bursts into David’s apartment as he finishes a phone conversation with Jena. She convinces him that she hates Yussef and pretends to help him because his boss, a General Ali orchestrating a military takeover, has her mother and sisters hostage. She tells him he 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. They spot the van, but Webster takes the candies to eat. Following him, David and Yasmin watch him discover the cipher and telephone someone from a phone booth; they learn that person is Beshraavi, with whom Webster is entering into a double cross against Yussef. Beshraavi and Webster are to meet at the Ascot racetrack.

At Ascot, Yasmin is with Beshraavi, while David searches for Webster. David and Yasmin make plans to meet at 9 that evening at Trafalgar Square after David gets the cipher from Webster. David spots Webster rendezvousing with Sloane, who hands over an envelope of money. David knocks the cipher out of Webster’s hand, and the paper floats into the track with the horses approaching. As David and Webster struggle, Sloane attempts to stab David but accidentally kills Webster. David runs onto the track and retrieves the cipher just before the horses gallop by.

David makes copies of the cipher, mailing the original to himself for safekeeping. He then sees headlines of the newspaper, which implicates him as Webster’s killer.

David believes that Mrs. Ragheeb (Malya Nappi) may know something important about the cipher. Looking at the cipher, Mrs. Ragheeb tears it up in frustration, implying that she knew that Ragheeb was working on something dangerous. David also tells her that he is working with Yasmin, her mother and sisters in danger at the hands of General Ali. On this news, Mrs. Ragheeb states that Yasmin is lying in that she has no mother or sisters, only a father who happens to be General Ali himself.

At 9 that night at Trafalgar Square, David hops into Yasmin’s car and they drive off. Angry at Yasmin’s deceit, David lies that he does not have the cipher with him but has decoded the message, he making up some nonsense. She relays that information to the embassy via telephone regardless. David and Yasmin arrange to meet later at the hotel where he is staying. After she drops him off, David flags down a taxi and follows her to Yussef’s construction site. David sees Yussef operating a wrecking ball, planning to kill Yasmin with it. David rushes to save her, and Yussef is electrocuted to death.

At his hotel room with Yasmin, David decodes the cipher. The coded message is, “Beshraavi plans assassinate Jena twelve thirty June eighteenth”, which is in twenty minutes. They don’t know where to go until Yasmin sees on a newscast that Jena has just landed at the airport. David and Yasmin make it to the airport a few minutes before 12:30. David gets to Jena and knocks him to the ground, when bullets from Sloane’s machine gun land where Jena was just standing. However, Lufti then shoots Jena dead. Yasmin whisks David off and convinces him that the man who was just shot is an imposter of Jena.

They discover that the real Jena was abducted by Beshraavi, and they free him. Beshraavi and Sloane pursue them in a helicopter, which crashes and burns.

David and Yasmin end up in romantic bliss back at Oxford.

Cast

Production

Donen later estimated they spent $400,000 on the script alone.[1] Cinematographer Christopher Challis recalled that the film went through several rewrites. As both Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren were contracted to do the film Challis stated that Stanley 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"[3]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England, Stein and Day, 1974 p341
  2. ↑ "Big Rental Pictures of 1966", Variety, 4 January 1967 p 8
  3. ↑ p. 176 Challis, Christopher Are They Really So Awful?: A Cameraman's Chronicles Janus Publishing Company Lim, 1995

External links

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