Thursday, September 01, 2011

In defence of the superficial... oh, the glamour!

Arabesque (Stanley Donen)

Arabesque has the unfortunate handicap of being Stanley Donen's follow-up to the rather more revered and more polished Charade. It's unfairly dismissed as a poor imitation of it's predecessor. That Gregory Peck is a poor man's Cary Grant and that the film is, at best, camp hokum and at worst lazy and boring. Even a Bond rip-off! No matter. 
I will say I have never been a huge fan of Gregory Peck. I have always thought him a little too cold and wooden. His granite façade often seems impenetrable to me. There are one or two exceptions (the campy but under-rated Duel in the Sun always comes to mind). The label of poor man's Cary Grant is maybe a little too harsh but sometimes is rather fitting. Here though, the character of Prof. Pollock is a rather fusty and naive character. A 'wet fish' if you like. So the first time we see him he has literally driven his pupils to sleep with his dry lecture. He is a quintessential stereotype and Peck fits the part like a glove. Cary Grant, at this point in his career, was the very epitome of cool suave and knowing sophistication. He just wouldn't have been right for the part. He wouldn't have sent anyone to sleep and he certainly would have seen through Yasmin (Sophia Loren) from the outset.

Arabesque is not a pale imitation of Charade. It's just a less subtle pastiche of Hitchcock. The line between pastiche/homage and actual rip-off is often a thin one and always subjective of course. But it's more problematic with Hitchcock because many of his films are templates - he invented and perfected a lot of the rules and techniques of the spy/suspense genre we now take for granted. Arabesque and much of the spy/suspense genre films from the 60s, including the Bond films, are remakes or variations on the 'formula' perfected by Ernie Lehman and Hitchcock in North By Northwest - the sophisticated hero, armed with witticisms if not a gun, the cool and beautiful heroine who is not what she seems and who beds the villain as well as the hero, the famous landmark set pieces and breakneck chase sequences, the charming villain surrounded by loyal & lethal henchmen and so on (while on the subject, two Hitchcock regulars were considered when making the Bond films: Cary Grant was considered for playing Bond and Bernard Herrmann was considered for the score. Imagine how much more Hitchcockian Bond would have felt with those two elements in place)

The sequence at the racetrack is most definitely a send up of the racetrack scene in Notorious. In Notorious it's a scene about restraint and is played for tears. A heartbreaking Bergman is reduced to tears as she is rebuffed by a seemingly uncaring Grant. In Arabesque, Donen keeps it light and frothy; plays it camp - Peck and Loren overplaying the cloak and dagger routine by speaking in 'la-di-dah' clipped tones and Loren in an improbably large hat. Just as this is a tongue-in-cheek wink to Notorious, during the finale, where our heroes are chased into a field of green crops and are attacked by the villains with farming machinery, we get a joke on the crop-duster sequence in North by Northwest. But these are only a couple of very obvious references - Arabesque is full of them, some more subtle than others, and that's why it's such fun.
That and Sophia Loren looking utterly splendid - she is given a different Dior outfit for every scene and when Peck meets her for the first time, and utters "Hello... helloo, hello, hello helloooo!", you are with him with every coo!
The villains are thoroughly camp if slightly inconsequential. Alan Badel as Beshraavi, like Blofeld with his cat, is never without his falcon on his arm and never takes his dark glasses off - I think it's meant to be intimidating. It's not - you just keep expecting him to walk into the furniture. He also seems a little too interested in dressing Yasmin in new shoes rather than threatening her with anything more physical!
And all the Arab characters are just Brits with painted faces - mostly not even bothering with an accent. Which of course only adds to the camp value.
Mix in Henry Mancini's fantastic score and Christopher Challis' distinctively psychedelic and very sparkly camera-work (lights, mirrors and reflections just about everywhere) and Arabesque feels totally of its time and genre - glamorous, sophisticated, huge fun and completely superficial. What's not to enjoy?


Watch Arabesque (1966) Gregory Peck, Sofia Loren, Dual Sound (Eng-Span).avi in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

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