dougdoepke Having the grandest artistic eye in the movie business can not only over-awe an audience but also mislead it. There is hardly a single camera setup in any of the movies rightfully called his, where Welles doesn't produce a striking visual image. When complemented by an equally grand script and fascinating characters, the result is an unforgettable Kane; even a good script plus offbeat characters produces an exotic Touch of Evil. But when the script is broken and the characters more cheesy than offbeat, the result is an Arkadin, in my book, a meretricious misfire. I say "mislead" because those grand visuals can lead one to believe that something equally worthy or profound must be lurking in the narrative. It's like receiving a beautifully wrapped package with all the expectations that naturally arise. If the contents on first glance seem disappointing, a search may begin for something hidden, something that will fulfill the initial promise of the wrapping. In short, it's the expectations that come to define the movie, not the result itself. With Arkadin, the narrative appears to disclose nothing more than a series of awkwardly assembled pieces. Perhaps these can be arranged into a hidden redemptive pattern as some enthusiasts grope for. Then again, why should viewers have to resort to an extreme of analysis in order to appreciate a movie, even a Welles movie. To me, such a contingent result indicates failure to put together a successful movie package, no matter what the cause, how grand the wrapping or how hopeful the analysis. Indeed, it's Welles's name that's on the movie, while even Shakespeare had his flops.

T Y After an extremely pretentious opening quote, followed by an opening curio about an empty airplane, the story gets rolling as a very talky palooka (some b-movie star) shows up in an attic with great urgency to entreat a man to exit the premises fast, because a third man is coming to kill him. Then he launches into a very long, convoluted explanation (none of which is interesting) of the story so far, which goes on and on and on ...one wonders where the killer is. This crappy device eats up half the movie! The story drags on so long that the would-be savior, when interrupted, barks at the attic-dweller, "I'll tell the story my own way!!" Oh there's time for a whole 'story,' is there? Directness and urgency are not qualities found in Mr. Arkadin, The Stranger, Touch of Evil, Lady from Shanghai, etc., In Arkadin (as in most Welles movies including Kane and the Third Man) he plays the amoral heavy, the climax usually coming when he belatedly explains his outsider philosophy.Mr Arkadin doesn't work. It's worse than incoherent, it's a dumb, showy movie. Welles understands everything about film-making, and nothing about narrative structure. He is so anxious to make every single moment filmic that any larger goal is lost. He will always sacrifice the overall movie in favor of a pile of virtuoso moments that don't assemble; and his drama is limited to unaffecting histrionics. Everything is visually striking but nothing is meaningful; the scenes don't add up to a coherent movie, and the shots don't add up to coherent scenes. More is more with Welles, and if it's visually slick, it must be the right choice. Can you find the through-line in this Mannerist mess? And if you can, do you care about any of it? Does it engage your mind, or just your eyes? In aiming high, Welles neglects the basics about what choices might make a movie stupid. Every development that's supposed to deepen the story instead deepens the nonsense. He does himself no favors with his preference for pointlessly elaborate, antiquated plots. He seems to buy his plot by the pound. The movie shoots itself in the foot three or four times a minute; sometimes by piling genre clichés on top of genre clichés; sometimes from craving another prettily composed shot of something (cue the castle!). The movie is packed with inept, eye-rolling unsubtle-ties.Frequently out of necessity, but just as likely due to lack of discipline, Welles treats film as a medium he can re-conceive after it's in the can. It's an odd, intriguing approach; but all of his movies end up as chaotic and uninteresting as Arkadin, despite continually striking camera work. Arkadin is definitely a title to rent (and important to know about) but it defies engagement. It's a shame he never bothered to write anything coherent after 1942, which to me, only supports the now disfavored Pauline Kael position that Welles could not have written the uncluttered, disciplined Citizen Kane.

theowinthrop CONFIDENTIAL REPORT (or MR. ARKADIN) has (if you look at the background notes) a complex history. It is supposedly based on a novel by Welles, which was actually written by a "ghost" writer, but it was then based on characters and situations from Welles' radio series as Harry Lime (based on the movie by Graham Greene and Sir Carol Reed - THE THIRD MAN), and then it has striking similarities to the basic structure of CITIZEN KANE (a wealthy powerful man is investigated by a reporter). As strip by strip this has been taken apart, older critiques are shown wanting. Peter Cowie's essay on the film in his book THE CINEMA OF ORSON WELLES is a pretty good one, given how poor the film versions were back in the 1970s, but he believed Welles wrote the book. Let's start from a point Cowie brought up - Arkadin may be based on figures like Sir Basil Zaharoff (the munitions dealer, known as "the Merchant of Death). One he mentions was Alfred Loewenstein, who I mentioned referring to two other films (SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS and GILDA) due to the interesting way he died - he fell out of his private airplane into the English Channel in 1928, and the exact reasons have never been settled satisfactorily - see the book THE MAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY for the best discussion of the mystery). Thus the plane without a pilot is not as odd an opening as presented (although Loewenstein's staff and pilot were still in the plane when it finally landed). Starting from there the film does look like KANE, except in the exact details. For one thing, Charles Foster Kane died before the reporter is sent to investigate his life - and the scandals that crop up, or failings, or successes are well known to the public. But Kane, for all his failings, is part of the American power circle and social scene. Arkadin is a would-be billionaire too, but he does not make his fortune from mining, real estate, and newspapers, but from dealing with opportunists around the globe (we learn he sold defective military equipment to the Italians in the late 1930s). He has more of a hit-and-run type of approach that Kane (who barely cared for his fortune) never had - at one point he calls up his minions to "Buy Copper", which by the way is not as simplistic an order as one critic suggests (not Cowie) but exactly what someone like Arkadin would say to his minions after discussing the matter with them before.The original KANE screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz had a sequence in which Kane killed a man over Susan Alexander. This was based on the rumor (still debated, possibly unfairly) that William Randolph Hearst shot Thomas Ince on his yacht. Welles took this out of that script except for a bit about Raymond the butler knowing where all the bodies were buried. This is actually an improvement on that script, as Charles Kane's failings don't really seem to include a desire for corpses.Kane's tragedy is that he is desperately trying to be everything to everyone and yet remain his own master. His character is one of the most complex in American films (at least up to 1941 - possibly up to 2007). Arkadin's tragedy is a realization he is a creature of the nightmare world - a scorpion - desperate to make his daughter's world better at all cost. But if he is from the gutter, what if his former associates try to blackmail her? What would she think of him by their revelations? Charley Kane lost his normal growing up when his mother did what she mistakenly thought was smart: take him away from his drunken father and give him all the warmth of Thatcher's bank. Gregory Arkadin left the slime of the European swamplands for the grandeur of international finance and castles in Spain, and a British Marquis fiancé for his Raina, always aware that if your base was a swamp you can still fall back into it.So there are differences in the two figures as well as similarities. I first saw ARKADIN in 1973 on late night television. The version I saw apparently was the horribly botched cut version of the distributors in the U.S. in the 1950s where sequences flew about without keeping the rhythm of the film or it's sound track in tact (best example: this version has Van Stratton trying to get information out of Oscar (O'Brady - Sophie's husband) while denying him drugs on a boat - but we are shown the latter before we see the boat where this is going on!). I was impressed at sequences with Mischa Auer and Michael Redgrave, and that was about it. Since then more complete versions have turned up on video which make more sense. It's not in the front rank of Welles' best (KANE, AMBERSOMS, MACBETH, OTHELLO, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, TOUCH OF EVIL - maybe THE TRIAL) but it holds up as well as say LADY FROM SHANGHAI or THE STRANGER. The worst thing is the vagueness of the sound, (a problem of all of Welles' independent productions in Europe). I think it is definitely worth watching, but certainly not in that grotesque 1950s American version.

blanche-2 One of my favorite people to read about and watch is Orson Welles. So I watched "Mr. Akadin," or "Confidential Report," as it is sometimes known, with great interest. By 1955, Welles was a Hollywood outsider, the great years behind him. He made films on a shoestring and hired himself out to get money to complete them. The most heartbreaking part of one of his biographies is the story of Welles having dinner with Spielberg, hoping the dynamic director could help him get a distributor for his latest movie. But Spielberg only wanted to talk about the past, about the legendary Orson Welles. No one would help him, not Warren Beatty, no one."Mr. Arkadin" is the story of a man, Guy Van Stratten, who runs around the world on the basis of a few words heard as a man is dying, words, the man assures him, that are worth millions. Just seek out Mr. Arkadin and mention Bracco and Sophie. Van Stratten, a hood, and a woman, Mily, do just that, and Van Stratten meets and later falls in love with Arkadin's daughter (played by Welles' third wife, Paola Mori) and gets inside the man's home and life. Arkadin claims amnesia and hires Van Stratten to find out about his past for him.This is a good story in a problematic film. There are the Welles touches of the odd camera angles and special lighting, but the film is disconcerting because the dubbing is way off - I at first thought it had been made in another language. Also, some of the acting is just horrible, particularly from Patricia Medina (Mily) and Robert Arden (Van Stratten). However, Welles assembled a brilliant group of foreign character actors for the other roles - Akim Tamirof, Gert Frobe, Michael Redgrave, Mischa Auer, Katina Paxinou - incredible, and they probably did their roles as favors for Welles for very little. Welles himself plays Arkadin, and it's a broad performance we're used to seeing when, frankly, he's phoning it in, which he did here as he was busy with everything else involved in the movie."Mr. Arkadin" looks like a student film, but it has some wonderful moments, both frightening and funny. A Welles film is always worth seeing even if it doesn't always exactly hit the mark. And he hit the mark so many times - you never know when something he did is going to turn into a masterpiece.