After Charade became a big hit Stanley Donen tried to recapture lightning in a bottle with Arabesque. Gregory Peck seems ill at ease in a role I can only assume was written for Cary Grant. His partner is Sophia Loren. Unfortunately they don't have much chemistry.
Again it's a Hitchcockian pastiche, filmed with some 60s psychedelic touches, the story taking place in London rather than in Paris and the macguffin being a cipher that needs to be decoded. Someone is killed, the trace leads to Peck, so he's the innocent man on the run. There's also a chase to prevent the assassination of a prime minister, like in The Man Who Knew Too Much. It doesn't all make that much sense. Most of the dialogue falls flat. The villain could maybe have been a bit more camp.
You're right. "Charade" was way better. Plus Walter Matthau!
ReplyDeleteWalter Matthau almost steals the film! Hmmm... should maybe watch some more of his films. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (the original!) is also a good one.
ReplyDeleteI saw again the original Pelham a few months ago. An airtight script, not a gram of fat in it. Yet one more pointless remake...
ReplyDelete"Taking of the Pelham" is so good, I refused to see the Denzel Washington/John Travolta remake...even for free. As with most remakes, was the point of that one?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, let's not forget that Tarantino also ripped off the original "Taking" with his color-coded hitmen in "Reservoir Dogs."
ReplyDeleteAs for Matthau, it's worth noting that he also played in one of the few decent Elvis movies, "King Creole." When it came to picking scripts, Walter had the Midas touch, eh?
The paradox is that they keep remaking classic films, where the remake is bound to be less interesting. It's okay if they take a half good film, like Ocean's 11, the remake actually being pretty good.
ReplyDeleteI agree but unfortunately that's rarely the case. Usually they take the great stuff and make it worse. Like Billy Wilder's "Sabrina." Or Gus Van Zant's "Psycho"!
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, it perplexes me when they take an old "brand" like "Taking of the Pelham" or "Manchurian Candidate" or TV characters like "The Honeymooners or "The Coneheads" or "Rocky and Bullwinkle" or "Josie and the Pussycats" and they pitch it to the youth market, which has no clue what this is based on. They can't pull in the teens, who have no frame of reference, and, in the process, they piss off the older viewers who remember the source material fondly.