Mr. Arkadin (ar KAH din) is notorious for having an especially problematic production, even for one featuring and directed by Orson Welles. You see, he had missed one deadline too many and gotten dismissed from the creative process by producer Louis Dolivet (better known for politics than film). At least five edits saw theatrical release, none with Welles' approval. The cut retitled Confidential Report, running 98 minutes, is neither the most widely seen version overall nor the one thought to be closest to what Welles ultimately had in mind; more likely it stems from an earlier draft.
Like in Citizen Kane, the plot involves examination of the past life of a rich man played by Welles. This time, the man in question actually calls for the examination -- confiding to narrator-protagonist Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) that he himself can't remember who he was before 1927. Guy travels to multiple countries to find answers, and the picture he pieces together is a good deal uglier than Kane's. Gregory Arkadin (sporting a strange yet aptly hybrid accent for Welles) wants this information forgotten from the world -- at all costs.
In particular, he wants to keep his daughter, Raina (Paola Mori), from ever finding out, as it would shatter her image of him. Not that she has such a high opinion of him to begin with; she calls him "the Ogre," if only because he hires men to watch her all the time. Apparently, this form of his paranoia is more a matter of protection than distrust. It's because of Guy's crush on her that he meets Mr. Arkadin. I'm not sure whether he hopes that doing her father a good turn will increase his chances of being allowed with her or he just wants to collect a fee.
Oh yeah: It wouldn't be much of a noir if Guy weren't pretty despicable in his own right. He has a history as a smuggler and little regard for decorum. He doesn't even properly break it off with another love interest, Mily (Patricia Medina), before starting on Raina, nor does he try to keep it a secret from Mily. Why Mily continues to help him is anyone's guess, but such characters evidently exist in RL. Regardless, I do find myself rooting for Guy when his situation grows dangerous, not unlike with a morally flawed Hitchcock hero.
At times, my head was swimming. The plot, based on three episodes of the radio show The Lives of Harry Lime (whose Lime, oddly enough, is so different from in The Third Man that Guy looks worse), is not particularly complex, at least in this cut, but it moves quickly, despite a long stretch of low intensity. I'm afraid that that speed is partly due to clumsy editing. Many scenes seem to end abruptly, with a fade-out before a conversation has reached a good stopping point.
That's not as bad as the discrepancy between dialog and lip movements. At first I assumed that the international project had to rely on actors who didn't speak English. Instead, some of the lines got changed in post-production, for no likelier reason than Dolivet's preference. Does the new dialog work otherwise? Well, the gestalt is OK. There are even a few funny moments, including an eccentric one-scene wonder played by Michael Redgrave.
I can see the ambition that Welles must have brought to it all. It could have been a masterpiece of the genre. Instead, while it may be more hit than miss, the misses rather stick out. Sometimes they interfered with my enjoyment of the thrills. In retrospect, perhaps I should have given precedence to the Corinth Films version, but I doubt I'll bother now.
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