Mr. Arkadin

Mr. Arkadin (first released in Spain, 1955), known in Britain as Confidential Report, is a French-Spanish-Swiss coproduction film, written and directed by Orson Welles and shot in several Spanish locations, including Costa Brava, Segovia, Valladolid, and Madrid. Filming took place throughout Europe in 1954, and scenes shot outside Spain include locations in London, Munich, Paris, the French Riviera, and at the Château de Chillon in Switzerland.
Plot
A small, fleet single engine plane flies empty across the daylight sky. A flashback voiceover begins to explain why, and who had been in it before it was abandoned.
Guy Van Stratten, a penny-ante American smuggler working the docks in Naples, observes a man being chased in the darkness, and, seemingly, improbably, his one-legged pursuer. The quarry falls to the ground, stabbed, gasping with his last breaths the names "Gregory Arkadin", a famous international tycoon, a dark "oligarch" of his day with a dark and mysterious past, and, merely, “Sophie”. Stratten and his girlfriend and accomplice Mily travel to Arkadin’s castle in Spain, seeking to discover how these clues can be transformed into money.
By striking up a friendship with Arkadin's mercurial daughter Raina, seemingly the only person for whom Arkadin feels affection, the womanizing Stratten gets himself invited inside. Arkadin has already learned of Stratten and Mily’s interest in him, and of the couple’s criminal history. Instead of turning them away he openly offers to pay Stratten $15,000 for uncovering information about his past, which he explains has been lost to amnesia. According to him, he woke up in a square in Switzerland in 1927 with 200,000 Swiss franks in his pocket and no memory whatever prior to that. He then parlayed this mysterious windfall into a new identity, enormous power, and uncountable wealth, but is troubled by not knowing who he was, and still is; Stratten impresses him as sufficiently enterprising, and ruthless, to find out, in, Arkadin demands, total secrecy. Always a user, Stratten continues to "romance" Raina, who plays at it to rebel against her overbearing - and disapproving - father.
Stratten starts scouring Europe for spoors; Arkadin shanghais the clueless Mily on his yacht in order to learn Stratten's true motives. From interviews with a strange series of people—the proprietor of a flea circus, a Viennese junk-shop owner, an impoverished noblewoman in Paris, and a heroin addict he tortures with withdrawal—Stratten learns that the pre-1927 Arkadin was a prime mover in a sex trafficking ring in Warsaw, abducting girls and selling them into prostitution in South America. "Sophie" is the former madam and ringleader, from whom he stole his providential windfall. She proves to be a resigned, tolerant old woman living out her days as a recluse in Argentina, who remembers ex-boyfriend Arkadin with some affection and has no intention of publicizing his past.
Putting telltales together, Stratten discovers that not only has Arkadin been following him and visiting all the witnesses, they all shortly end up dead - including Sophie. He confers with Raina, who startles him by revealing that her father does not have amnesia. Why was he hired, then?, Stratten puzzles. And will he ever get paid?
He is compelled by Arkadin to attend the bully's Christmas Eve party in Munich, where he learns that he'd been being used as a cat's paw by his benefactor, who wished to permanently hide his criminal past from Raina, lest he lose both her love and adoration. Worse, Mily has turned up dead, and Stratten's been framed for her murder. Knowing he will die too if he cannot save the last living connection to Arkadin's past, Jakob Zouk, Stratten hastens to try to find him and spirit him away. Zouk, impoverished, terminally ill, and down to his last days, has no sympathy for Stratten; he shortly ends up murdered in Stratten's hotel room, with Stratten again framed.
Stratten makes a desperate new plan to flee to Arkadin's Spanish castle, tell all to Raina, and hole up there together in sanctuary. He buys the last seat on the last plane to Barcelona. Raina meets him there at the airport. Before Stratten can reveal his secret Arkadin arrives overhead in a rented plane. He commandeers the airport's P.A. system and commands Raina not to listen. With no time to explain why, Stratten exploits her rebellious side and convinces her to say simply "It's too late". Radio silence and an empty plane traversing the sky are all that follow.
Aware she'd been used by Stratten to save his own life, and always knowing her father had been corrupt, whatever his real identity, Raina wants nothing to do with the scorpion, Despairing, she accepts the overture of a mealy minor British noble she had spurned earlier for him and leaves with the milquetoast at the wheel of her sports car.
Stratten, who had gambled everything - even Mily - playing his hand for sheer greed, lost every single thing but his life, ending worse off than he had begun. An appropriate reward for both his conduct and character, the ending makes plain.
Cast
Orson Welles as Gregory Arkadin
Robert Arden as Guy Van Stratten
Patricia Medina as Mily
Paola Mori as Raina Arkadin
Akim Tamiroff as Jakob Zouk
Michael Redgrave as Burgomil Trebitsch
Grégoire Aslan as Bracco
Jack Watling as Bob, the Marquess of Rutleigh
Mischa Auer as the Professor
Peter van Eyck as Thaddeus
Annabel Buffet as the woman with a baguette in Paris
Suzanne Flon as Baroness Nagel
Frederick O'Brady as Oskar
Katina Paxinou as Sophie Radzweickz Martinez
Tamara Shayne as the woman who hides Zouk
Terence Longdon as Mr. Arkadin's Secretary
Gert Fröbe as a Munich Detective
Eduard Linker as a Munich Policeman
Manuel Requena as Jesus Martinez
Gordon Heath as the pianist in the Cannes bar
Additionally, Welles dubbed several vocal parts (including Mischa Auer's lines), and actress Billie Whitelaw dubbed Paola Mori's dialogue to cover her thick Italian accent.
Production
The story was based on several episodes of the radio series The Lives of Harry Lime, which in turn was based on the character that Welles portrayed in The Third Man. The main inspiration for the plot was the episode entitled "Man of Mystery," though some elements may have been lifted from an episode of the radio show Ellery Queen entitled "The Case of the Number Thirty-One," chiefly the similar-sounding name George Arkaris, the mysterious birthplace, the French Riviera property, and the Spanish castle. Most of the other key elements for Arkadin's character come from a real-life arms dealer, Basil Zaharoff.
In an interview for the BBC's Arena series first shown in 1982, Welles described Mr. Arkadin as the "biggest disaster" of his life because of his loss of creative control. The film was not released in the United States until 1962.
Countess Paola Di Girfalco, who played the role of Arkadin's daughter under her stage name of Paola Mori, become Welles's third wife in 1955, some time during the film's production. The film started Welles's longtime relationship with Spain, where he lived for several periods in his life.
Released in some parts of Europe as Confidential Report, this film shares themes and stylistic devices with The Third Man (1949).
Multiple versions of the film
Several differing versions of the film were released. In his 1991 essay "The Seven Arkadins", film historian Jonathan Rosenbaum identified seven different versions of the story, and since its initial publication, two more versions have emerged, including a novel and a stage play. When Welles missed an editing deadline, producer Louis Dolivet took the film out of his hands and released several edits of the film, none of which were approved by Welles. Adding to the confusion is a novel of the same title that was credited to Welles, though Welles claimed that he was unaware of the book's existence until he saw a copy in a bookshop. Welles's friend Maurice Bessy, a French screenwriter, is generally considered to be the author of the novel.
The "seven versions"
In his 1991 essay "The Seven Arkadins", film historian Jonathan Rosenbaum identified seven different versions of the story, and since the essay's initial publication, two more versions have emerged.
Pre-film
1. Three episodes of the radio series The Lives of Harry Lime, written, directed by and starring Welles. The basic plot of a wealthy Mr. Arkadian (spelt with three As in this version) commissioning a confidential report on his former life can be found in the episode "Man of Mystery" (first broadcast 11 April 1952), while the episode "Murder on the Riviera" (first broadcast 23 May 1952) and the final episode "Greek Meets Greek" (first broadcast 25 July 1952) both contain plot elements repeated in the film. Note that in the film, the popular Harry Lime character from The Third Man is replaced by the less sympathetic Guy Van Stratten, since Welles did not own the copyright to the Lime character as character rights had been bought by Harry Alan Towers for the Lives of Harry Lime radio series.
2. Masquerade, an early version of the screenplay of what would eventually become Mr. Arkadin, has substantial differences from the film versions. The screenplay follows a strictly chronological structure rather than the back-and-forth structure of the film. Many of the scenes in the film are set in different countries, and a lengthy sequence in Mexico is entirely missing from the final film.
Different edits of the film released in Welles' life
Crucially, none of the versions available before 2006 contained all the footage found in the others; each had some elements missing from other versions, and each has substantial editing differences from the others.
3. The main Spanish-language version of Mr. Arkadin (93 mins) was filmed back-to-back with the English-language version and was the first to be released, premiering in Madrid in March 1955. Although the cast and crew were largely the same, two characters were played by Spanish actors: Amparo Rivelles plays Baroness Nagel and Irene Lopez Heredia plays Sophie Radzweickz Martinez. The two scenes with the actresses were reshot in Spanish, but all others had Spanish dubbing over English dialogue. This version credits Robert Arden as "Bob Harden".
4. There is a second, longer Spanish-language cut of Mr. Arkadin, which was unknown to Rosenbaum at the time he wrote The Seven Arkadins. (He confessed in the essay to having seen only brief clips of one version.) This version credits Robert Arden as "Mark Sharpe".
5. Confidential Report (98 mins), the most common European release print of Mr. Arkadin, premiered in London in August 1955. Differences to this version include off-screen narration from Van Stratten. Rosenbaum speculates that the editing of this version was based on an early draft of Welles' screenplay, as its exposition is far simpler than that of the "Corinth" version.
6. The "Corinth" version (99 mins) is named after Corinth Films, the initial U.S. distributor of the film. Until the 2006 re-edit, it was believed to be the closest version to Welles' conception. Peter Bogdanovich discovered its existence in 1961 and secured its first U.S. release in 1962, seven years after alternative versions of the film were released in Europe.
7. The most widely seen version of Mr. Arkadin (95 mins) is the U.S. release version which entirely removes the film's flashback structure and presents a simpler, linear narrative. Rosenbaum describes it as "the least satisfactory version", which is a "clumsily truncated" edit of the "Corinth" version, often editing out half-sentences, making some dialogue incomprehensible.
This version is often erroneously thought of as being in the public domain but as the film is a European co-production its copyright does not expire until 2068, seventy years after the 1998 death of the last surviving co-creator, composer Paul Misraki. The vast majority of DVD releases are very poor quality bootlegs of the US version.
An 8th - Novelization
8. The novel Mr. Arkadin was first published in French in Paris in 1955, and then in English in 1956, both in London and New York. Welles was credited as author, and the book's dustjacket boasted: "It is perhaps surprising that Orson Welles … has not written a novel before."
"I didn't write one word of that novel. Nor have I ever read it," Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. "Somebody wrote it in French to be published in serial form in the newspapers. You know — to promote the picture. I don't know how it got under hardcovers, or who got paid for that." It was serialised in the U.K. newspaper the Daily Express in 1955.
Welles always denied authorship of the book, and French actor-writer Maurice Bessy, who is credited as having translated the book into French, was long rumoured to be the real author. Rosenbaum suggested that the book was written in French and then translated into English, as lines from the script were approximations that seemed to have been translated from English to French and back to English. Research by film scholar François Thomas in the papers of Louis Dolivet has uncovered documentary proof that Bessy was indeed the author.
The 9th - Criterion edit (2006)
9. Whilst no version of the film can claim to be definitive as Welles never finished editing the film, this version (105 mins) is likely the closest to Welles's original vision, though the creators of this restored version express their doubts as to the "correctness" of altering another artist's work. It was compiled in 2006 by Stefan Drössler of the Munich Film Museum and Claude Bertemes of the Cinémathèque municipale de Luxembourg, with both Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum giving technical assistance. It uses all available English-language footage, and attempts to follow Welles's structure and editing style as closely as possible and also incorporates his comments over the years on where the other editions of the film went wrong. However, it remains an approximation; for instance, Welles remarked that his version of the film began with a woman's body (Mily) on a beach, including a close-up that makes her identity apparent. Whilst the Criterion edit restores the film opening on a woman's body on the beach, only a long shot exists (taken from the Corinth version) in which it is unclear whose body it is; no close-up of Mily could be used, as the footage no longer exists.
The Criterion Collection release includes the following:
The "Corinth" version of the film
The Confidential Report version of the film
Commentary tracks by Welles film scholars Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore
A copy of the novel
Clips from one of the Spanish-language versions
The three Harry Lime radio episodes on which the film was based
The Criterion Collection release is now out of print.
Reception
Japanese film director Shinji Aoyama listed Confidential Report as one of the greatest films of all time. In 2012 he said, "No other movie is destructive as Confidential Report, which gives me different emotions every time I see it. Achieving this kind of indetermination in a film is the highest goal that I always hope for, but can never achieve."
Filmmaker Christopher Nolan stated in his undated 21'st century Criterion Top 10, "No one could make much of a case for Welles’ abortive movie overall" but that the film contains "heartbreaking glimpses of the great man’s genius".
See also
The Scorpion and the Frog § Origins
References
External links
Welles Amazed: The Lives of Mr. Arkadin an essay by J. Hoberman at the Criterion Collection
1955 films
1950s mystery films
1950s psychological thriller films
English-language French films
British black-and-white films
French black-and-white films
Spanish black-and-white films
Films about amnesia
Films directed by Orson Welles
Films set in Amsterdam
Films set in Cannes
Films set in Copenhagen
Films set in Mexico
Films set in Munich
Films set in Naples
Films set in Paris
Films set in Spain
Films set in Tangier
Films shot in Munich
Films shot in Madrid
Films shot in Spain
Films with screenplays by Orson Welles
Films shot at Bavaria Studios
1950s Spanish films
1950s French films