Mr. Arkadin

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.

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.

To get the full value out of Arkadin, i recommend you only see it once you've seen most other Welles pictures, from the Good (Kane, Ambersons, Trial, Falstaff, Touch of Evil), The Bad... okay, they're all still interesting, i wouldn't call any of them bad, but some of them were more marred by production conditions (Othello, Macbeth) or cutting by the studio (Lady from Shanghai) than others. If you've fallen in love with Welles' brilliant pictures, seen the times when he wasn't able to realise his ambitions, and heard about all his unfinished films and seen the tantalising segments from some of them (notably, for me, Merchant of Venice and famously The Other Side of the Wind), you'll appreciate that we were able to see Mr Arkadin at all!

So while i know there is so much to admire in Arkadin, that each frame is aching with Wellesian visual beauty (which is closer to unusual/strangeness than classical beauty), i know that most people, especially Wellesian newbies, will find Arkadin inaccessible. The fact that it is quite difficult to follow, and its dialogue is often hard to understand, is made worse by the fact that its picture and soundtrack are in bad condition on all available video/dvd releases. The other notable thing about Arkadin is that it is available in different forms (like most Welles movies). Welles' initial Arkadin must have been quite disconcerting indeed. Like they usually did, the studio cut a fair portion of it, but still left it in its flashback form (which varies from one to two party scenes). Later on, someone, i don't know who, reordered Arkadin so it played out in chronological order. This is the version available for wide release in America, with Tony Curtis (for what reason i don't know) doing an introduction, and talking more about Kane than Arkadin. The only australian release of Arkadin at present seems to be the chronological one, so if i ever get my hands on the others i may write separate reviews on those.

And no it is not sufficient to sum Arkadin up as a poor remake of Kane. It has only superficial elements in common with Kane (mystery into true nature of old man, flashbacks), but visually it is nothing like Kane. I always put off watching it because i was upset by people's saying it was a poor man's Citizen Kane - but whoever said that can't have seen the same Arkadin i did.

For Welles fans there is so much to marvel at. It is one brilliant, original frame after another. I just couldn't watch it slow enough. I had to pause it about every ten seconds to wind back and watch something again and go "oooh" and "aaah." It also has sexy Patricia Medina and a great score.

Some favourite scenes:

The tracking back shot of Van Stratten (Robert Arden) going up the steps to Zouk's place (Akim Tamiroff).

The scenes of snow falling outside Zouk's place.

Every scene where Van Stratten is interviewing an eccentric character from Arkadin's past. All are such wonderful scenes. Especially the flea circus master scene.

The rocking boat scene is incredible. The sexual energy of voluptuous, erect-nippled Patricia Medina, stumbling around the room, giggling and taunting Arkadin as the rocking boat mirrors the shakiness of her drunken state.

There is a magestic tracking shot in the party scene, which takes place in a sort of ballroom resembling the Ambersons' ballroom, where i believe Welles almost made up for the studio's cutting up a similar sweeping unbroken tracking shot through the room in the ballroom scene in Magnificent Ambersons.

The endless comparisons between this film and Kane made in these reviews goes to show how little people see beyond the obvious "power corrupts" theme that runs through pretty much ALL Welles' films (even Magnificent Ambersons portends the changes the automobile will have on the world). Besides this theme, Kane was a drama about a man robbed of his mother and his childhood who spends his life trying to recapture both, by playing at newspaper tycoon and building his own pleasure palace and by trying to fill the void where motherly affection should have been with the affection of everyone in the world.

Mr Arkadin is a thriller about a man so afraid of losing his daughter's love and esteem he is willing to kill to maintain it. The story is pure genius: after an opening shot showing an empty aeroplane in mid-air, we flash back to a man found stabbed in the back. Hence Welles sets up two mysteries at once for us to think about. When the knifed man tells Arden's girlfriend two names that are worth a fortune, Van Stratten thinks to blackmail Mr Arkadin with this scant information. Arkadin calls his bluff, and instead confides in Van Stratten that back in 1927 he found himself in Prague wearing a suit with a lot of money in his pocket and no recollection of who he was or how he got there - total amnesia. He hires Van Stratten to find out who Mr Arkadin really is, and thus Van Stratten embarks on a voyage around Europe, trying to trace Arkadin's life back from 1927.

At each destination in Europe, Van Stratten finds Arkadin there too, so we learn that Arkadin has more on the mind than tracing his origins. And when the people Van Stratten interviews start dying, the suspense is shifted up another gear.

Were it not for the lame performance by Arden and the odd moment of awful dubbing, this flawed masterpiece may well have been held in as high esteem as Kane, Ambersons, Touch Of Evil and The Lady From Shanghai, rather than being relegated to Macbeth's 'interesting failure' status. Storytelling wise, this is Welles' at his best, and it's surreal, disturbing plot is more a meeting of The Lady From Shaghai and The Trial than Citizen Kane. Personally, I think this is a greater picture than Touch Of Evil's plain power-corrupts line and The Lady From Shaghai which depends on one high-concept set-piece after another.