Monitor Where Have You Gone, Omar Sharif?

By MICHAEL QUINN

High drama. Searing conflict. That's what you might expect when you attend a viewing of Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest hit, True Lies -- but not in the movie itself. Rather, check out the picket lines surrounding theaters in many cities, deployed by Arab Americans objecting to yet another screen depiction of the Arab as blood-crazed terrorist. Alas, movies have a long tradition of stereotyping Middle Easterners:

The Arab as Exotic Lover. Immortalized as The Sheik (1921), Rudolph Valentino once owned the franchise on faux Semitic Romeos. The nobly savage Italian actor and a host of imitators swept a generation of European love interests into their arms -- the ladies' honor often preserved by eleventh- hour plot devices (in the case of The Sheik, Valentino's character was revealed to be an Englishman in Middle Eastern drag). More recently, crudely comic variations on this theme have had Western women fending off oversexed petrosheiks in films like Protocol (1984) and The Jewel of the Nile (1985).

The Arab as Faceless Horde. Beau Geste, remade countless times, is the paradigm of a cowboys-and-Indians version of the Middle East, with the French Foreign Legion and other colonials standing in for the cavalry and Arabs on horseback providing the Indians.

The Arab as Unruly Child. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) remains the best-known example of the Arab as a political naif in need of tutelage from a wiser Westerner, often adorned in Arab garb -- a better Arab than the Arabs themselves (see Indiana Jones I and III). Remove that "guidance," and get the chaos of Lawrence's end: Arab leaders at one another's throats in a scene reminiscent of the depiction of black politicians in the racist Birth of a Nation.

The Arab as Plutocrat. The gas lines of the '70s fueled the image of overpowerful sheiks, shifty in kaffiyehs and sunglasses, plotting the petrodollar domination of the world in grim melodramas like Marlon Brando's The Formula (1980), Richard Gere's Power and Jane Fonda's Rollover (1981). There is an ironic precedent for such pop paranoia: the anti-Semitic myth of the all-powerful Jew.

The Arab as Terrorist. Middle Eastern terrorists shot their way through popular movies like Black Sunday (1977) and Delta Force (1986). Now that Soviet villains have fallen to history's cutting-room floor, Arab terrorists may have the field pretty much to themselves.