Movie Review: Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren in Arabesque (1966)

Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren make an attractive couple in Arabesque, 1966.

It looks like the sight of Sophia Loren about to take a shower is giving Gregory Peck heart palpitations. Which is understandable.

Gregory Peck on the set of Arabesque. In case you weren't aware, this picture should let you know that Gregory Peck was seriously handsome. This picture is on the cover of the book Icons of Men's Style.

The director Stanley Donen imitated many of Alfred Hitchcock’s trademarks in his 1963 film Charade, starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Three years later, Donen would borrow liberally from the elements of Charade in his movie Arabesque, starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren. According to IMDB, Peck’s role was written with Cary Grant in mind. Like Charade, Arabesque is a thriller where things are not quite what they seem. Peck plays Professor David Pollock, an expert in hieroglyphics. At the beginning of the film, we see him lecture about hieroglyphics, and it feels a bit like The Da Vinci Code. But fortunately, there are no scenes in Arabesque where the plot comes to a screeching halt as someone explains something to us in great detail. Arabesque opens with a murder in an optometrist’s office, and there are plenty of tricky camera angles throughout the movie, as we are constantly looking into mirrors and through prisms. I greatly enjoyed all of the camera trickery, as it made Arabesque more interesting to watch.

Arabesque also borrows from Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, as Peck plays an ordinary man caught up in a plot to kill a prime minister of an Arab nation. North By Northwest is echoed at the beginning of the movie, as Peck is forcibly shoved in the prime minister’s car while jogging, which echoes Cary Grant’s kidnapping at the beginning of Northwest. Other references to Northwest include Peck being given a shot of truth serum and then dumped out onto a highway. Feeling drunk, Peck first thinks he’s a matador and the cars are bulls, but he eventually commandeers a bicycle and gets away safely. This sequence is an homage/rip-off of the scene in North By Northwest where Grant is forcibly intoxicated by James Mason’s hoodlums and dumped in a Mercedes-Benz convertible along a twisting road near jagged cliffs. Of course, Grant also gets away safely. At the end of Arabesque, Donen stages his own version of the famous crop-duster scene from Northwest, as Peck and Sophia Loren have to crawl around while being chased by sharp and pointy farm implements. 

Unfortunately for Donen, Arabesque can’t hold a candle to North By Northwest. Gregory Peck does his best with the light comedy of the script, but as you watch, you can’t help but feel that Cary Grant would have done it better. It’s unfair to compare Peck to Grant, as Peck was not a comedic actor, and Grant was one of the greatest light comedic actors the movies have ever seen. But because Arabesque so blatantly copies other films starring Grant, the comparison is inevitable. 

Peck and Sophia Loren don’t have a lot of chemistry together, which also hurts the movie. She plays a mysterious woman whom Peck meets at the house of a businessman named Beshraavi, played by Alan Badel, who seems to be impersonating Peter Sellers. Peck has been hired by Beshraavi to decipher a code. However, it soon becomes obvious that Beshraavi is going to kill Peck as soon as he finishes deciphering the code. So Peck hides out in Loren’s bathroom as she takes a shower-which I read as a nod to the scene in Charade where Cary Grant takes a shower with all of his clothes on. Like Charade, where the audience and Audrey Hepburn are constantly wondering whose side Cary Grant is on, the audience of Arabesque and Gregory Peck are wondering whose side Sophia Loren is on. (Spoiler alert for Charade: of course Cary Grant’s the good guy! Duh! Cary Grant is ALWAYS the good guy!)

Sophia Loren looks gorgeous, which is pretty much all that the role requires her to do. For his part, Peck looks very handsome and dashing at age 49 and the grey in his hair just makes him look more distinguished, as though he really needed to look more distinguished. Looking distinguished was what Gregory Peck did all day, every day. 

Arabesque isn’t a great film, but it’s an enjoyable enough movie if you’re looking for a 1960’s Hitchcock-lite trifle.

Hitchcock's "To Catch a Thief"

I just watched Alfred Hitchcock's 1955 film "To Catch a Thief," starring the incomparably gorgeous combination of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. It's one of Hitch's slighter efforts, but enjoyable all the same. The third star of the film is the scenery around Monaco and the South of France, where the movie was filmed. The film tells the tale of John Robie, a former jewel thief who finds that someone is imitating his robberies, in the hopes that the police will blame Robie for the robberies. Robie is determined to prove his innocence, but he has significant obstacles in his path. Through his friend Hughson, who works for an insurance company, Robie is able to obtain a list of who owns the most valuable jewels in the area. Robie's idea is to pinpoint when the copycat thief will strike again, and then Robie will be able to catch them in the act. Which is where Grace Kelly, playing Frances Stevens, comes in. (Finally! It takes half an hour before she gets significant screen time.) Kelly is on vacation with her mother, who owns lots of expensive jewelry. Kelly's mother is played by Jessie Royce Landis, who, ironically, went on to play Cary Grant's mother in "North By Northwest," even though she was only 10 years older than Grant!

Robie pretends to be a vacationing American (!) and wins the trust of Kelly and Landis. (Cary Grant as an American? With that accent?) There is an instant attraction between Kelly's character and Robie, and she pursues him despite the fact that she thinks he might be the jewel thief. And fireworks ensue, literally. The dialogue between Grant and Kelly is spiced with double-entendres that must have seemed quite racy in 1955, and gave the censors headaches. One of the most famous scenes in "To Catch a Thief" takes place in Kelly's hotel room, as she and Grant observe a fireworks display out of the window. It's a gorgeous scene, dimly lit, with Grant looking dapper in his tuxedo standing in half-light at the window, and Kelly, looking gorgeous in a white chiffon gown, imploring Grant to touch her necklace. It's pretty sexy stuff.

In a way, "To Catch a Thief" is kind of a dry-run for "North By Northwest." Cary Grant is at his most dapper and unflappable in both films, they both feature Hitchcock's trademark "mistaken identity" premise, Grant is involved in perilous car chases on cliffs in both films, and in both films he is pursued by gorgeous blondes who are anything but coy. (Compare the initial scenes with Grace Kelly in TCAT to those with Eva Marie Saint in NBN.) "To Catch a Thief" is not a masterpiece in the way that "Vertigo" or "North By Northwest" are, but it's still a highly enjoyable film, made more so by the charisma of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.