Arabesque (1966) on Netflix
NR19661h 45mActionComedyMysteryThriller
A professor of hieroglyphs at Oxford is murdered and his coded message stolen. David Pollock, who takes over his class, is recruited to help expose a plot against a Middle Eastern politician.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.4/109,157 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes74%
Trailer
Plot summary
David Pollock teaches hieroglyphics at Oxford, where a colleague has been murdered and a coded message taken. Major Sloane asks Pollock to meet the shipping magnate Nejim Beshraavi, but Pollock declines. Hassan Jena, who leads a Middle Eastern country, and Mohammed Lufti, its ambassador in Britain, approach him, and Jena persuades him to accept. At Beshraavi's London mansion, Pollock is offered thirty thousand dollars to decipher the message.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Arabesque (1966)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Stanley Donen wanted Cary Grant, whom he had just directed in Charade, to play Professor David Pollock in Arabesque, and the film's dialogue was written with Grant in mind.
- Gregory Peck, hurt years earlier in a horse-riding accident, could not run fast enough to keep up with Sophia Loren in a chase scene; she asked Donen to make him run faster, and the director had to persuade her to run slower.
- Stanley Donen estimated that $400,000 was spent on Arabesque's script alone, and cinematographer Christopher Challis recalled the film went through several rewrites, saying the more it was rewritten the worse it got.
- For Arabesque, Stanley Donen used what he called a "living camera" technique: the crew suspended the camera so the operator had the mobility of a hand-held model without having to carry its weight, avoiding the wobble of earlier hand-held work.
- Many of Arabesque's internal and external scenes were shot at Tyringham Hall in Buckinghamshire, which at the time was a largely unused and unfurnished disaster recovery site owned by the ANZ Banking Group.
- The railway bridge action scene in Arabesque was filmed on the historic Crumlin Viaduct in Crumlin, Caerphilly, which was being dismantled at the time.
- Sophia Loren asked for 20 different pairs of shoes for her character in Arabesque, a request that led to her lover in the film being described as having a foot fetish.
