Arabesque is a 1966 American comedy thriller spy film directed by Stanley Donen and starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, written by Julian Mitchell, Stanley Price, and Peter Stone based on The Cipher, a 1961 novel by Alex Gordon (pseudonym of Gordon Cotler). The film, along with Donen's immediately prior film Charade (1963), is usually described as being "Hitchcockian", as it features as a protagonist an innocent and ordinary man thrust into dangerous and extraordinary situations. It was the last film of that genre which Donen would make.Arabesque was filmed in Technicolor and Panavision and was distributed by Universal Pictures.