Confidential Report

This is an insane movie. It's almost as if someone had taken Citizen Kane and the Mask of Demitrios shoved them in a blender then tried to make a coherent film out of the bits while under the influence of heavy medication.

And somehow it works - but only just.

If you haven't watched this film yet and are contemplating doing so I will warn you that Robert Arden's 100% subtlety free performance is incredibly bad and his character (Guy Van Stratten) has to carry the first part of the movie almost alone. Please just grit your teeth and put up with him (and the dodgy lip sync) for a bit, because what comes later is weird, deeply flawed, but bizarrely watchable semi-masterpiece. Dreamlike and occasionally very funny.

I would love to have seen Welles' version.

The music is perfect.

This is a highly uneven but interesting mystery from Mercury Productions and writer-director Orson Welles. Two-bit American hustler Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) searches for a mysterious, super-rich man named Gregory Arkadin (Orson Welles) in hopes of getting some money from him, one way or another. Surprisingly, Arkadin confesses to Guy that he suffers from amnesia, and he hires Guy to research Arkadin's past to fill in the blanks of his past. Guy suspects there's more to the story when those he interviews start showing up dead.

This movie is a mess, but it's a fascinating mess. The movie was taken out of Welles' hands in the editing phase and was released in various cuts all over the world over the course of a decade or more. The version I watched was assembled from all of the various versions, and supposedly most closely resembles what Welles wanted. It's still a slightly confusing jumble, but it's entertaining. It's unlike most movies of the mid 50's, with rapid edits, odd camera angles, and the aforementioned narrative structure utilizing flashbacks.

The sound is either mostly or all post-dub, which also adds to the disorienting effect. This movie has a lot of flaws (several shots are out of focus, Welles' fake nose looks terrible), but I found it an intriguing mystery, and I was never quite certain what was coming, which is exceedingly rare these days. Plus, the many brief appearances of classic character actors, such as AkimTamiroff, Katina Paxinou, Mischa Auer, and Michael Redgrave, all playing bizarre and eccentric characters, is amusing.

After seeing Gregoire Aslan knifed on a dock and hearing a couple of last words like Sophia and Mr. Arkadin, Robert Arden and girl friend Patricia Medina know at least part of it.

Mr. Arkadin refers to the mysterious gazillionaire played by Orson Welles. However Sophia is as elusive at first as the mysterious 'rosebud' in Citizen Kane.

Welles seeing that Arden is a man of wit and resource in the seamier side of life, hires him to find out about Sophia. In fact the story that Welles gives Arden is that before 1927 when he found himself in Zurich, Switzerland with several million francs, he has amnesia and has no memory of his past.

It's obviously a lie because one of the reasons that Arkadin is so mysterious is that he has steadfastly refused to be photographed. Not something someone would normally do unless they had a lot to hide.

Still Arden takes the assignment and it leads to some startling answers and puts Arden's life in peril.

Welles came up short with Mr. Arkadin. It's an intriguing story and has some good performances by the cast members already mentioned and people like Mischa Auer, Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave, and Katina Paxinou from Welles's past. Problem is that Welles seems to be using a lot more in his bag of tricks than is necessary to tell the tale.

A little to arty for art's sake. Still it's an interesting story and well acted.

You guys are great...so much interesting, smart stuff in all the comments. What can I add? Well, I saw it last night, and I was thinking about The Auteur Theory and Roland Barthes' thoughts about the one big book of which all books are a part. And, although I haven't seen Alphaville for years, I realized that the connections between these two films are important: the Mizraki score and the performance of Akim Tamiroff.Godard is such a great mannerist, and this film (Arkadin) is such a basic text for director - driven cinema. How can this film mean anything to anyone who doesn't understand the rage to create - against all odds, against one's self-destructive nature, against one's death wish? It is "breathless", truly. Scenes never give the impression of ending, everything is done in overdrive, people are constantly looming, dizzyingly moving in and out of shot; the grotesquerie of the bad acting rhymes with the grotesquerie of the costume set pieces and with that of the B movie Euro - freak character actors parading, one by one, in front of the camera for their star turns. "Feeding time" indeed! I saw Arkadin shortly after seeing Spielberg's Munich. The only similarity is in the constant change of location. But where in the Spielberg this functions as a celebration of money, budget and the power of illusion, here each location is both overcrowded and threadbare. The Munich of Arkadin is a bombed-out nightmare with traces of its former elegance. The Europe of this film is so haunted and sleepwalking; the world of this film is made up of bits and scraps.

The fact that Arkadin connects closely to Kane or Quinlan is obvious and certainly interesting. Although it should seem obvious at this late date that Welles has patterns and themes that reoccur throughout his films. Does this fact still illuminate anything? If anybody questions the fact that Welles is an artist...well, this film will just add to their confusion. But for us believers this film can function like the ritual suffering of the penitents in the film. It hurts so good!

In this curious film, the ridiculous clashes with the sublime. Robert Arden and Patricia Medina turn in two of the worst, cheesiest performances imaginable. They're both straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. He's all lock-jawed and hard-boiled; she vacillates between wide-eyed fawning and witch-like threats. The tedium they engender is very difficult to get past, because you can't even watch them as campy.

That's partly because their performances are just that bad, and partly because there is so much else in this movie that works well, or at least strives for excellence. There are a variety of striking images placed before us. Welles' eye for distinctive camera angles and atmospheric lighting was working overtime in this picture. You might quibble with some of his choices as being a tad too melodramatic, but you can't fault him for careful attention to detail. His performance is the usual Welles stuff--overpowering, and perhaps at times almost cartoonish like that of Arden and Medina. But make no mistake: when Welles was cartoonish, it was because he meant to be. Not because that was the only way he knew how to "act." Paolo Mori was also wonderful as as Arkadin's daughter. There were other great characters along the way. Their performances also clash noisily with the wooden hamming from Arden.

And, as others have mentioned, the sound is problematic. Clearly, the movie was overdubbed, and badly, after the fact. In fact, when I first started watching it, I was convinced that it was originally filmed in a foreign language. Nope--something went wrong during filming, it appears, or Welles for reasons of his own decided to re-do all of the sound in the studio after filming. The result is pretty bad. Whether a scene is in a small room, a piazza, an open field, or a vaulted cathedral, the result is the same. Background noise sounds just like that: artificial background noise. The voices sound like they were recorded in a very small, very dead studio. Amateurish and clumsy.

The result is a movie that is, at times, interesting to watch, but it's hard to forget its weaknesses, even for a moment.

One wonders how many times the stagehands had to wrangle a raging Welles off of Arden, prying his hands from the actor's neck, convincing him that murder is illegal, even for a cinematic giant, feeding him rum punch and peanuts, and telling Arden to go hide for fifteen minutes until the anger has passed.