ULTRA MOD! ULTRA MAD! ULTRA MYSTERY! BQ SEES TRIPLE WATCHING "ARABESQUE".......

Arabesque (1966)     As you can see, we borrowed this movie's poster blurb for our post's headline.......

             A perfect triplet of phrases.........not just for "Arabesque",  a dizzying (and frequently just plain dizzy) swirl through Hitchcock and Bond tropes......but a fitting description of l960's thrillers overall........

             Veteran film musical director Stanley Donan and screenwriter Peter Stone struck lightning with "Charade" in 1963, their breezy faux-Hitchcock comedy-mystery with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.......

             After the sturdy, standard conventional filmmaking of "Charade", nothing could prepare you for their next romantic thriller "Arabesque".....deliberately senseless and bordering on hallucinogenic in its overload of eye-popping visual imagery.......

             Hitchcock famously admired Steven Spielberg as...."the first one of us who doesn't see the Proscenium Arch"......but in this movie, 9 years before "Jaws", Donan had already thrown the ole Arch out the window.......filling his camera shots with skewed angles, and a barrage of imagery bounced into the camera from reflective surfaces of all shapes and sizes......

             For 105 swift minutes, Donan puts on a magician's smoke-'n-mirrors show designed to keep you from ever dwelling on the incomprehensible plot......(which we'll make no futile effort to describe in any detail......something about a sadistic Arab oil magnate plotting against his country's benevolent Prime Minister.....'nuff  said....)

            Cary Grant bowed out of this one, preferring to finish his film career with the more age appropriate role in "Walk, Don't Run".....(see our post on 6/12/18).....

            Gregory Peck stepped in as the tweedy Oxford professor suddenly up to his neck in murderous Middle Eastern double-and-triple agents.......including the especially duplicitous Yasmin Azir (Sophia Loren, never more stunning and duly worshiped by Christopher Challis's camera, whenever he isn't pointing it at mirrors, glasses and a host of other reflections...)

           (We briefly amused ourselves with the thought of John Travolta at the Academy Awards, attempting to pronounce 'Yasmin Azir' and all the other Arabian characters in the film....)

            Don't ask us how, but somehow Peck's painfully awkward reading of quips 'n zingers obviously written for Cary Grant works perfectly......it's borderline unintentionally funny but it's endearing just the same...….

            And his natural reaction to the sight of the ravishing Loren........well, it was the exact same reaction from us everyday, ordinary non-movie star folk..........(as in......hubba, hubba, hubba.....be still my heart....homina, homina, homina……)

             Off they go, this odd couple with chemistry to burn, into the movies's breathless array of Hitchcockian-Bondian set pieces........where the twists and turns of the impenetrable plot become even more bizarre when viewed through the warped surfaces of every shiny object director Donan encounters in his camera shots.

              Kicked off by Bond title designer Maurice Binder's pop art animation, the whole thing's a dreamy package of eye-catching thrills and gags..........the kind of movie that starts people on the road to Movie Buff-dom in the first place...…

             No debating with ourselves here, an Ultra Mod, Mad, and Mysterious 5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS. For a smooth summer cooler, BQ says treat yourself.