#322: WELLES, Orson: The Complete Mr. Arkadin (1955)

WELLES, Orson (United States)

The Complete Mr. Arkadin [1955]

Spine #322
DVD

Orson Welles's Mr. Arkadin (a.k.a. Confidential Report) tells the story of an elusive billionaire who hires an American smuggler to investigate his past, leading to a dizzying descent into a Cold War European landscape. The film's history is also marked by this vertigo. There are at least eight Mr. Arkadins: three radio plays, a novel, several long-lost cuts, and the controversial European release known as Confidential Report. Criterion gathered all of these elements to create this landmark box set — which also includes outtakes, behind-the-scenes footage, and a new comprehensive version of the film — at last unraveling one of cinema's great mysteries.

The Corinth Version

[1955]

99 minutes

Confidential Report

[1955]

98 minutes

The Comprehensive Version

[2006]

105 minutes
Black & White

Monaural

1:33:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2006

Director/Writer

Orson Welles was 40 when he wrote and directed The Complete Mr. Arkadin.

Other Welles films in the Collection:

#1104: Citizen Kane (1941)
#952: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
#870: Othello (1952)
#1191: The Trial (1962)
#830: Chimes At Midnight (1966)
#831: The Immortal Story (1968)
#288: F For Fake (1975)

The Film

How to approach this monstrosity — this “celluloid palimpsest”?

Three versions of the same film + commentary = 4 viewings. [There are actually six known edits of the film: the Corinth, Confidential Report, two cuts of a Spanish-language version, a pirated American butchering of the Corinth edit, and the 2006 Comprehensive edit.]

So Criterion decided to give us the mess in a three-disc set. I believe we could lived with only the Comprehensive Version, a 2006 pastische put together by Stefan Drössler and Claude Bertemes, but even that one is unsatisfying, because of an important omission which will be detailed below.

**

The Corinth Version

“Welles’s own version never existed, even in his own mind, since that mind never saw his own work in fixed and static terms. It’s still in perpetual development, just like our appreciation of his mercurial imagination.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum

Upgraded from 16mm to 35mm for this edition, the picture is still grainy and often distorted. But the intended flashback sequences are most intact in this version, and seem to resonate with the director’s intentions.

• One of the most imaginative shots in the film occurs starting at 1:54:12, when Welles shoots the speaker grill, transmitting Arkadin’s frantic radio communications, trying to get to Raina before Van Stratten.
• Cuts between the speaker grill, Raina, the empty plane — and finally, with the camera focused on the speaker grill, at 1:37:00, the radio static cuts to silence.
• This cut is missing from the Comprehensive Version. It seems the editors preferred the shot of the plane spinning dizzily to the ground. An uncertain compromise …

Confidential Report

This is the version that was recut by producer Louis Dolivet after Welles left Europe in ‘55, to resume his American career.

Things added that didn’t exist in Corinth:

• Bracco’s death
• The start of the masked ball sequence
• Arkadin’s commissioning the investigation from Van Stratten (Robert Arden).
• New offscreen narration from Arden
• Better use of Paul Misraki’s score
• 35mm. Much better picture

Negative: loss of most of the flashback structure.

Comprehensive Version

• The loss of the radio going silent on shot of grill
• 0:54:14 — check out the Parisian billboard in the background: “15th Anniversaire de Pacte Hitler-Staline.”

Film Rating (0-60):

54

The Extras

The Book

245-page book: Mr. Arkadin, the novel by Welles, with preface by Robert Polito.

Whoever wrote it, it’s a good read and compliments the film(s) nicely.

And like most novels, it contains florid descriptions which can never be translated directly to celluloid. For example, Gus is about to meet Sophie:

“There was no doubt that it was to the wife of the powerful General that I owed my expulsion from the country.

At first I had suspected Arkadin of a maneuver which would ensure that I didn’t meet his former mistress. Mistress in both senses of the word. But the insistent manner of the cop, the deference with which he pronounced Sophie’s name, made it clear that it was from her he had received his instructions.

It was a beautiful amber-colored evening, very sultry under the awnings. Women were cooking tortillas or offering bowls of dried water-melon seeds. Whenever the car stopped at a red light, ragged kids would crowd round the door holding out their dirty hands; then they would break up and start running in and out of the traffic like skinny chickens. As we passed I noticed the flaking domes like the flanks of a lizard, and great barbaric frescoes. These objects scattered my thoughts, my mind was blank. I was tired, probably. The sudden changes in altitude are very trying for foreigners. And for some time my life had been fluctuating rather too frequently, too many contradictory cross-currents of hope, disgust, impatience and discouragement.

But I was nearing the end.”

The Booklet

Thirty-six page booklet featuring an essay by J. Hoberman; essays by Rosenbaum, François Thomas and Drössler on the three versions, and a time line of Arkadin-related events by Thomas.

Hoberman:

“Parker Tyler, in his 1963 Film Culture essay ‘Orson Welles and the Big Film Cult,’ he explains the scorpion/frog story … ‘the scorpion must cross a stream (that is, Welles must make a film), but, to do so, he must enlist the help of a frog’ — i.e., a producer — whom he stings ‘at his own expense.’ By the time Mr. Arkadin was ‘finished,’ in the mid-1950’s, Welles had supplanted Erich von Stroheim as American cinema’s supreme martyr — ‘a lone wolf,’ per Tyler, ‘whose egoistic failures have stacked up to make him both notorious and famous.’”

Rosenbaum (The Corinth Version):

“Broadly speaking, the features of Orson Welles fall into two categories: those he finished and released to his satisfaction and those he didn’t. In the first category are Citizen Kane, Macbeth, Othello, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story, F for Fake, and Filming “Othello.” And in the second batch, The Magnificent Ambersons, It’s All True, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil, The Deep, The Other Side of the World, The Dreamers, and Don Quixote.”

Thomas (Confidential Report):

“I consider the cut that Warner Bros. distributed worldwide in 1956 — called Confidential Report — to be the available version that should be seen before any other … to me, what matters most is, first, the extent of Welles’s involvement and then the flow, the inner rhythm of the picture and sound editing. Despite its flaws, Confidential Report qualifies as the most Welles-like version in that area.”

Drössler (Comprehensive Version):

“Creating such an ‘ideal’ cut of a film that never existed in final form is quite a daring challenge, and goes far beyond any common restoration or reconstruction. It is only justified by the fact that Welles definitely did not authorize any of the existing Mr. Arkadin versions. By following all the indications we found in the documents and in the material itself, we hoped at least to come a little closer to Welles’s original ideas. In any event, this comprehensive version is the only way to experience Welles’s concept not just as a virtual idea, or as a compare-and-contrast exercise, but as a film, a real continuous cinematic flow.”

Mr. Arkadin: A Chronology (Thomas)

January 23, 1952: Orson Welles states in the French journal Opéra that he plans to direct a film from an unpublished crime novel of his called Mr. Arkadin.

• This certainly doesn’t jibe with either Bogdanovich being told that Orson never wrote a novel about Arkadin, and Arden’s recollection that Welles was dictating the novel during filming!

and

March 5, 1954: In a letter to Dolivet, Maurice Bessy offers to ghostwrite the novelization of Mr. Arkadin, commissioned from Welles by the daily newspaper France soir and the publishing house Gallimard.

• It’s possible this was just the French translation.

From there on, it’s just a sad tale of the scorpion/director and the frog/producer …

Commentary

The Corinth Version:

By Welles scholars Rosenbaum and James Naremore.

• Dutch angles — how he started using them after The Third Man (1949) {Spine #64} (a film he didn’t direct!) …
• Relationship between Arkadin and the Harry Lime episodes [see below] …
• Dubbing: Welles for Bracco (Grégoire Aslan) …
• Dubbing: Billie Whitelaw for Raina (Paola Mori, who Welles would marry — and who remained his wife until his death in 1985. He was unfaithful to her and she died a year after Welles in a car accident) …
• Dubbing: Welles for The Professor (Mischa Auer) …
• Dubbing: Welles for Oscar (Frédéric O’Brady) …
• Arden and Mily (Patricia Medina) — the two dumb Americans …
• Jakob Zouk (Akim Tamiroff) — Welles knew he had struck gold! His first of five films he made with Welles …
• Hoping the commentary would shed light, but they didn’t: at 0:21:34, a car drives by and Welles (Arkadin) is clearly in seen with a cigar in his mouth, but no beard or Arkadin makeup. What gives? …
• The Goya scene:
• Bob (Jack Watling): “Now some of us have come as visions and monsters. Goya.”
• Guy: “Who?”
• Bob: “You know Goya.”
• Guy (shaking hands with a man with a grotesque bird-mask): “Glad to meet ya.”
• Quoting the Bogdanovich interview:
• “Arkadin is a profiteer, an opportunist, a genial parasite who nourishes himself on corruption, and who doesn’t look for ways to justify himself. He could be Greek, Russian, Georgian, Yugoslav. Arriving from some old half-savage country, he sets himself up in modern Western European civilization, using his particular sort of energy and barbaric intelligence. His morality may be hateful, but not his spirit. I find it impossible to hate a passionate man … Harry Lime has no passion.”
• A “real aristrocrat” — Baroness Nagel (Suzanne Flon) …
• Another magnificent performance: Katina Paxinou (Sophie) … a long scene with hardly any camera movement — “a quietness at the center of the storm” …
• 1:15:11: A Welles joke: “(only available picture taken before death)” — Medina was supposed to have provided Welles with a photo for this scene, but never did — therefore, he used the “only available picture” — the photo from the striptease poster!
• 
  

Radio program

Three half-hour episodes of The Lives of Harry Lime, upon which the film is based, and an interview with producer Harry Alan Towers.

The radio programs are difficult to hear — they’re old and full of static; Welles as Lime is audible, bult the other characters are hard to hear. Their relationship to the story at hand is as follows:

“Man of Mystery” aired April 11, 1952

Arkadin — or Arkadian — is introduced. Harry Lime is Gus Van Stratten and the story is the same.

“Murder on the Riviera,” aired May 23, 1952

Nothing to do with Arkadin, except for the character of Mily.

“Blackmail is a Nasty Word,” aired June 13, 1952

Bracco’s death and secret. Amazons (the Polish criminals?) …

Despite its slim connection to Arkadin, this episode might be the most entertaining of the three …

Towers interview (Reviving Harry Lime)

Born in 1920 in London, Towers started as an actor and radio writer before establishing a production company: Towers of London.

Simon Callow introduction … Towers interview:

He had all the greats under contract for radio productions: Welles, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave (fabulous in Arkadin as the Polish antique dealer, Burgomil Trebitsch), Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, and Alec Guinness.

The story of how Welles got the part of Harry Lime in The Third Man is worth transcribing:

“Alexander Korda was rather like Orson; he was always short of money, and his usual method of finding the money to make a movie was to take some successful producer in the United States and make them their distribution partner. Well, in this case, Korda had selected David O. Selznick. Selznick wanted to cast Noël Coward in the role of Harry Lime and Korda knew with every riff of blood in his Hungarian body that Noël Coward was wrong and that Orson Welles was right.

He went to see Orson in Rome, and as he got off the plane from London, he caught his very expensive alpaca overcoat on the railing of the gangway, and tore it rather badly. So he sat down with Orson to try and convince him to do The Third Man. He only wanted him for four weeks and he offered to pay him $50,000. Orson was making movies in those days for 20th Century Fox … and he was always getting $100,000, and he absolutely refused — so Korda was getting desperate; he knew the following day he would be in New York and Selznick would insist on Noël Coward and it was going to ruin the whole movie.

As he got up to go, he saw this tear in his overcoat, and he took the overcoat and flung it at the feet of Orson, and said ‘here am I … offering you the second-best part in your entire life, and you won’t do it because you want too much money? And here am I … the man who’s producing the movie, and I can’t even afford a new overcoat!’

So Orson looks at the overcoat and says, ‘all right, I’ll do it for $50,000.’”

• About how he got the character rights for Harry Lime, and produced the radio series.
• The Sherlock Holmes episode with Richardson and Gielgud.

Extensive stills gallery

Confidential Report:

Men of Mystery

An interview with Welles biographer Callow, featuring his audio interview with Arden.

He also discusses Redgrave and Dolivet.

Arden claims — despite most claims to the contrary — that he observed Welles writing (dictating) the book …

The Comprehensive Version:

On the Comprehensive Version

Documentary featuring interviews with film historians Drössler and Bertemes and Welles confidant Bogdanovich.

On their reasoning in putting together this version.

Outtakes and rushes from the film

Welles takes; screaming at crew who are making noise!

Alternate scenes

With Spanish actresses in the roles of the Baroness Nagel and Sophie.

Fascinating!

Extras Rating (0-40):

35

54 + 35 =

89

By Director
By Spine #