Arabesque

With the recent news of the death of Stanley Donen, I decided that I would sit down and watch my DVD of Arabesque from the four-film Gregory Peck at Universal collection and do a fuller review than the one-paragraph mention I gave it some years back.

An opening scene involving an elderly professor getting killed at an eye doctor's office sets the scene that we're in for some sort of espionage. Cut to Prof. Pollock (Gregory Peck), a professor of Egyptology at a British university. The same eye doctor who killed the first professor approaches Pollock, offering him a job decoding some hieroglyphics, but Pollock wants more specifics.

One day after class he goes for his daily jog, which is where Pollock gets waylaid by a Rolls-Royce. That Rolls-Royce has as one of its passengers Prime Minister Jena (Carl Duering). He knows about the paper with the hieroglyphics on it, and that those must be some sort of code for what an opposition businessman, Beshraavi (Alan Badel), is doing. So the Prime Minister would like those hieroglyphics translated. (You'd think that Beshraavi already knows what he's going to do and thus wouldn't need the hieroglyphics translated, but I'm guessing that Beshraavi would have thought that hieroglyphics reveal what somebody else knows about him.)

Beshraavi is a ruthless businessman, keeping a peregrine falcon to go after anybody who is disloyal to him, so Pollock knows he's a sort of prisoner in Beshraavi's house. Also there is Yazmin (Sophia Loren), Beshraavi's lover and a mysterious woman. She realizes that Pollock is in over his head and in danger, suggesting that he try to get away with the piece of paper with the hieroglyphics. When he does, Beshraavi sends one of his men to try to kill Pollock and Yazmin.

They are able to flee to seeming safety, but it turns out there's another faction, led by Yussef Kasim (Kieron Moore) who also wants that paper. It all goes on like this until Pollock is able to determine the importance of this paper with the hieroglyphics, with a lot of twists and turns along the way.

The plot of Arabesque is in many ways a bit of a mess. The paper with the hieroglyphics, it turns out, is not a Macguffin, but otherwise figuring out how Beshraavi, Yazmin, and Yussef all fit into things will probably leave you confused. The fact that everybody's lying because of the espionage games doesn't help. Instead, watch for the various set pieces which come one after another, and are reasonably entertaining.

As for Stanley Donen, he has some rather stylish direction. The sets and cinematography are generally lovely, although there are any number of shots that some may not like, having been photographed through framing objects like chandeliers and various other odd perspectives. Arabesque is firmly dated in the 1960s, but it's a fun 1960s.