One late afternoon a couple of years ago, a plane was sighted about seventy miles out of Orly Airport in Paris. It was a private plane, medium sized, and nobody was in it; nobody at all. The plane, keeping its course steadily toward Paris, was flying itself. Why was it empty? Who had been flying it? And why, and under what circumstances, had they left it? Why? Thereby hangs a tale.
The plane had been flown by one Gregory Arkadin, who in the radio play employs Harry Lime to investigate his past, feigning amnesia. A year after the broadcast, Welles set out to adapt the story into a feature film. He later told Peter Bogdanovich, "One of the plots I thought up in a rush [for the radio series] was that plot - and I realized that the gimmick was super - it was the best popular story I ever thought up for a movie."
The story, then: Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden), a small-time hood and cigarette smuggler, and his girlfriend Mily (Patricia Medina), are given two names by a dying man on a dockside freight yard in Naples. They are told that the names are worth a small fortune. Mily seeks out one of the names - Gregory Arkadin (Welles), a mysterious and immensely wealthy financier, while Van Stratten attempts to strike up a relationship with Arkadin's daughter Raina (Paola Mori). Arkadin has Van Stratten investigated to discredit him, then makes an intriguing proposal: he will pay $15,000 to Van Stratten to investigate his past, claiming that he remembers nothing before 1927. Van Stratten proceeds to travel across the Continent interviewing people who knew Arkadin before he amassed his fortune. Unfortunately, these same acquaintances also begin to turn up dead.
The financing for Mr. Arkadin came together thanks to Louis Dolivet, a wealthy dabbler in film production. Based in Paris in the 1950s, he had actually known Welles since the mid-1940s, when they both championed Left-wing political causes in America. Welles' previous film, Othello (1952), had been filmed haphazardly throughout Europe over a span of several years. Largely self-financed, Welles filmed whenever he had earned enough money from outside projects to reunite his cast and get cameras rolling again. The more tidy financing for Mr. Arkadin meant a quicker shooting schedule, though the movie still shot for eight months in far-flung locations in Spain, France, and Germany.
The Mr. Arkadin script called for a colorful gallery of supporting characters, and Welles orchestrated a memorable series of bizarre cameos. The film is highlighted, in fact, by such guest stars as Michael Redgrave, almost unrecognizable as an antiques dealer; Mischa Auer looking at his flea circus, as well as the world, through a magnifying glass; Katina Paxinou as the much sought-after Sophie, sad and nostalgic while thumbing through a photo album; and Akim Tamiroff as the final person on the hit list, anxious for his last meal of goose livers. (Tamiroff was a favorite of Welles - he was unforgettable as Uncle Joe Grandi in the director's next film, Touch of Evil [1958], and was cast as Sancho Panza in Welles' unfinished Don Quixote).
Critics have often found fault with some of Welles' other casting choices for the film. Arden, who had worked with Welles on the Harry Lime and The Black Museum radio shows in London, is stiff and unappealing as Van Stratten, though that was quite possibly Welles' intention for the character. Paola Mori was Welles' girlfriend and had appeared in a few Italian films, but was inexpressive and spoke English only through a thick accent (her voice in this film was dubbed by Billie Whitelaw). Owing to the blank performances of Arden and Mori, there is little tension in the Arkadin-Van Stratten-Raina triangle. (More trivia involving the leading cast: five years after filming Mr. Arkadin, seasoned actress Patricia Medina married Welles' best friend Joseph Cotten).
Like Othello before it, Mr. Arkadin also fell victim to some technical deficiencies. Welles' full-blown false-nose-and-beard makeup tends to change shape from scene to scene, for example. The sound recording in the film is particularly erratic. The dialogue often sounds muddy, whether it was recorded on location or dubbed in after the fact. It is also disconcerting to hear Welles himself dubbing several actors in the film - not just the bit parts, but major performers like Auer.
Welles admitted that it took him three times longer to cut a picture than it did to shoot, and it was during the editing phase of Mr. Arkadin that he (once again) lost control of the film. Dolivet desperately wanted a Christmas 1954 release, but as Welles missed deadline after deadline, Dolivet took the film away and had others finish the editing. Several scenes which delved into Arkadin's character were eliminated, according to Welles, as was an elaborate flashback structure. Ultimately, several versions of the film were released, though a true director's cut does not exist. European versions bearing the title Confidential Report retain something of the flashback structure, but a version released in America in 1962 is cut to tell a straight chronological story. Due to the Spanish financing, yet another version exists with Spanish dubbing and a few substitute actors. Welles was later to say, "More completely than any other picture of mine has been hurt by anybody, Arkadin was destroyed because they completely changed the entire form of it: the whole order of it, the whole point of it - [The Magnificent] Ambersons [1942] is nothing compared to Arkadin!" Of course, loss of the final cut of his films was a chronic (and according to some, a partially self-inflicted) problem with almost all of Welles' post-Citizen Kane (1941) projects.
Mr. Arkadin, in any version, is disjointed and technically flawed, but contains flashes of brilliance and many memorable set pieces. As it features an investigation of the past life of a man of wealth and influence, some critics have dismissed the film as a pale echo of Citizen Kane. Such an attitude is short-sighted given the themes that Welles visited repeatedly in his oeuvre. After all, the plot of Welles' next film, the Hollywood-produced Touch of Evil, also features an outsider who shines a light on the past doings of a powerful figure while jeopardizing his wife and encountering a variety of bizarre and grotesque personalities along the way.
Producer: Louis Dolivet, Orson Welles
Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Orson Welles
Cinematography: Jean Bourgoin
Film Editing: Renzo Lucidi, William Morton, Orson Welles
Art Direction: Orson Welles
Music: Paul Misraki
Set Decoration: Gil Parrondo, Francisco Prosper, Luis Perez Espinosa
Costume Design: Orson Welles
Makeup: Roy Ashton
Cast: Orson Welles (Gregory Arkadin), Robert Arden (Guy Van Stratten), Patricia Medina (Mily), Akim Tamiroff (Jakob Zouk), Mischa Auer (The Professor), Paola Mori (Raina Arkadin), Peter van Eyck (Thaddeus), Michael Redgrave (Burgomil Trebitsch), Suzanne Flon (Baroness Nagel), Katina Paxinou (Sophie), Gregoire Aslan (Bracco), Jack Watling (Marquis of Rutleigh), Gert Frobe (Policeman).
BW-99m.
by John M. Miller
