“Mr. Arkadin–the Comprehensive Version”, 1955 (restored and cobbled together from five different versions in 2005). Written and directed by Orson Welles. Starring Robert Arden, Orson Welles, Patricia Medina, Paola Mori, Akim Tamaroff, and Michael Redgrave.
“Mr. Arkadin is a bad film such as only a great and self-consciously wayward artist could make, and only then when he has achieved nihilism in which he needs to make decline his self-sufficient subject, and a warning to anyone who might entertain hope… Mr. Arkadin is tortured self-parody, the sure measure of how greatly, secretly, Welles was terrified at his own life and condition.” –David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (which is itself a tortured, bizarre masterpiece)
Thomson had it right: Mr. Arkadin is a sad film, a film that was thrown together over the course of years, made on the cheap by a brilliant man with virtually no connection to financial reality. It stars one of the least charismatic men ever to hold down a picture, an equally charmless female lead (and Orson’s current love–how did the big boy do it?), and a plot that seems to confuse for its own sake. Welles claimed repeatedly that this movie was stolen from him (weren’t they all) and that it was his most promising, commercially. He was wrong. Nothing could have saved Mr. Arkadin from losing money. It was doomed to failure. And yet… and yet… Mr. Arkadin, like all of Welles’ wonderful films, is mesmerizing. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and watched it again. And again. And again–like an addict.
The picture opens with the naked body of a woman on a beach, moved every so slightly by the tide. Then, an airplane is shown flying without a pilot–and the movie begins. None of this makes any sense until much later, and even then it’s baffling.
Mr. Arkadin is the story of a fool, a man named Guy van Stratten, who wanders into a ruined building to find Jakob Zouk, played with gruff elan by Akim Tamaroff. Zouk is going to die, van Stratten argues, and only Guy can save him from being killed. Zouk doesn’t believe this for a minute. It’s Christmas, he was in jail but too sick to stay, so he’s more than content to pass away right there on that bedbug-riddled couch beneath an upside-down picture of the Fuhrer. When asked why Zouk should leave and go anywhere, Guy begins the tale of Mr. Arkadin.
Guy was a cigarette runner, a man with few scruples who was looking for an easy way to make a buck. As played by the greasy Robert Arden, who talks out of the side of his mouth in rapid-fire sentences, Guy is a character only a naive mother could love. At the docks one evening, he stumbles on a man who’s just been stabbed by a one-legged assailant. The assailant is shot by police, and the victim dies, but not before giving Guy a present of a name: Arkadin. Supposedly, that name connected with the dead man will get Guy untold riches.
Guy and his then-girlfriend, the shrill Patricia Medina, are on the hunt to squeeze some dough out of the very rich Arkadin. In the process, Guy meets Arkadin’s fetching daughter, Paola Mori, and falls in love, though you wouldn’t know it to look at either Arden or Mori. Never in my memory have two leads have so little chemistry–they look as if they loathe one another.
Arkadin doesn’t want anyone near his daughter–he fears that her suitors are only out for his money. Finally, when confronted with the fact that Guy got Arkadin’s name from this stiff, who apparently connects him to some nasty secret, he makes Guy an offer: Arkadin has had amnesia, and cannot remember anything prior to 1927. He has no idea how he made his fortune, and wants Guy to dig up his past to find out. In the course of doing so, Guy finds a number of horrible secrets, but everyone connected with Arkadin’s dark past is murdered. And so the story goes.
This might, in fact, have been a profitable story in the hands of someone with an eye for crowd-pleasing scenery, bland actors, maybe even boisterous special effects and the like. In Orson Welles’ hands, however, it becomes a labyrinth into the brain of the big guy, a bizarre aggregate of strange camera angles, wonderfully eerie scenes, and oddball characters you won’t find even in David Lynch. Guy follows his trail, inexplicably, into the tent of a flea-circus ring-leader, displaying his charges’ talents, and then allowing them to feed off him. There’s a masquerade with costumes straight from Goya (literally, according to Welles, the master liar), and, in a stunning moment, a confrontation between Arkadin and Mily, Guy’s girl, on a swaying yacht, the camera moving about as if it were seasick, the actors stumbling about. As usual, Welles knows how to make his lesser characters shine–consider Michael Redgrave’s antique dealer, sniffing about, working his grift in the oppressive clutter his store; Amparo Rivelles, who went uncredited, as the Baroness, telling her tales of Arkadin while playing cards and recalling a painful past; or Mischa Auer, the Copenhagen Professor and lover of fleas…
You can’t take your eyes off Mr. Arkadin, especially Welles, made up in his freaky wig and beard, looking like a golem, his booming voice commanding every scene. The story of the film is itself an odd one, there being five different versions, from two continents and four countries, one of which was only recently discovered. It began as a radio idea, was later turned into a novel sold only in Europe, supposedly by Welles, though he claims not to written one word of it. (That is, until someone says how great the book is, then he takes all the credit). The Criterion Collection’s version includes three different Arkadin’s in sparkling new prints, interviews with the friendly Germans who built the “comprehensive version” based on Welles’ notes, and much more.
If I had my druthers I would have stumbled into this movie long ago, when it was released sporadically, at some tiny town theater on the main drag of a lakefront tourist town, and been blown away. Mr. Arkadin is a lesser work, for sure, but the work of a madman who knew how to make his ramblings entertaining, and peopled with crackpots who gave the performances of their lives. Mr. Arkadin is self-destructive, vain, ridiculous, confusing, and, ultimately, plot-wise, a disappointment. And you won’t see a more bizarre, more fascinating film this year.
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