by Allan Fish
(France/Spain 1955 105m) DVD1/2
Aka. Mr Arkadin
Paying twice for the same thing
p Louis Dolivet, Orson Welles d/w Orson Welles novel “Mr Arkadin” by Orson Welles ph Jean Bourgoin ed Renzo Lucidi m Paul Misraki art Orson Welles
Robert Arden (Guy van Stratten), Paolo Mori (Raina Arkadin), Orson Welles (Gregory Arkadin), Michael Redgrave (Burgomil Trebitsch), Akim Tamiroff (Jakob Zouk), Katina Paxinou (Sophie), Mischa Auer (the professor), Patricia Medina (Mily), Jack Watling (Marquis of Rutleigh), Peter Van Eyck (Thaddeus), Grégoire Aslan (Bracco), Suzanne Flon (Baroness Nagel), Tamara Shayne (woman in apartment), Frederic O’Brady (Oscar),
One could write a doctorate thesis about the incomplete world of Orson Welles. It’s easy to imagine all of his films as incomplete. Kane could easily be longer, with additional titbits and stories surrounding his myriad of objects awaiting the incinerator in that final shot. The bastardisation of Ambersons is almost as mythic as the film itself. His three Shakespeare films could all be seen as fragmentary in some form or another, even if at least one now survives as a masterpiece. The Lady from Shanghai feels like part of a hazily recalled drunken nightmare. The Trial likewise feels somehow abridged, as if cutting from one room in Kafka’s descent into hell and into another while missing others out. The Immortal Story is such a flimsy anecdote it could be part of a portmanteau film that doesn’t survive. Despite heroic efforts no-one can be entirely sure which version of Touch of Evil would be Welles’ own personal choice. Not to mention the abandoned Don Quixote and It’s All True or the legal minefield of surviving footage that is The Other Side of the Wind.
Or maybe they’re all cover stories perpetuated by a criminal mastermind, a Mr Wu figure, a Hagi or Mabuse if your tendencies are towards Fritz Lang, a mythic magnate so paranoid as to make Charles Foster Kane seem avuncular. Some might call him James Moriarty, others Keyser Soze. Here it’s Gregory Arkadin, the name you barely speak and live. Arkadin is a figure shrouded in mystery, and Guy van Stratten, a small-time criminal long in Italy, is told about him by two men, firstly a dying old man and then another at a Naples dockside who also dies. He is intrigued and goes to look into this Arkadin, and on the way becomes enamoured of his daughter, before being hired by the same Arkadin to look into his own past, telling him that he’s suffered from amnesia and can’t remember anything before 1927. The more van Stratten digs into Arkadin’s past the more he becomes aware that he’s being used as a pawn to draw a line under Arkadin’s shady past, the scapegoat to end all scapegoats.
What we have is a shaggy dog story within a shaggy dog story; indeed several within one. There are moments that don’t seem to make sense, and while one can point to it never actually being finalised to Welles’ satisfaction, that’s only partly true. Various versions exist, the longest assembled by Criterion in 2006, but it doesn’t necessarily improve matters. It’s as if Welles were deliberately hiding part of the story in the way Arkadin was hiding and leading on the unfortunate sucker van Stratten. It certainly isn’t helped by Robert Arden, but while one can dream of Monty Clift or Bill Holden in the role, the amateurish performance adds to the sense of fate closing in (would Clift or Holden have been that believably dumb?). One can say it makes no sense, but as in the oft-told story Arkadin tells the party guests, the scorpion can’t help but bite the frog, even if it means his own death, because it’s his nature. Welles can’t resist pulling the wool over our eyes. It was termed a disaster at the time, and for sure it’s not one of Welles’ masterpieces, but how can we do without its list of legendary one or two scene cameos; a typically seedy Tamiroff, Medina at her most buxom, screwball relic Auer masquerading as a professor and, best of all, a divinely Jewish Redgrave. It’s not dissimilar to watching Picasso use an etch-a-sketch and rubbing out as he goes (which isn’t too far from what Pablo was doing at the time for Clouzot), or like grabbing what you can at the world’s greatest funeral buffet before the servants come to clear away.
