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Confidential
Report Program Notes
Welles
Amazed: The Lives of Mr Arkadin
by J Hoberman
Another movie, another cause celebre: Orson Welles’ Mr Arkadin
has been dismissed as a disaster and hailed as a masterpiece.
In 1958, Cahiers du cinema declared it one of the
twelve greatest films ever made — unaware that its intricate
series of flashbacks had been reedited and “normalized,” or
ruined, for its French release by producer Louis Dolivet.
A movie then without a definitive version (Jonathan Rosenbaum
explicated seven texts and ur-texts in a 1992 Film Comment
article), to be read in any order (like Julio Cortazar’s
Hopscotch), this madly stylized cheapster, also known
as Confidential Report, is the fullest expression of
Welles’ European exile. Beginning in 1954, Mr Arkadin
was shot for five months, mainly in Spain — much of it in a
Madrid studio — with additional locations in West Germany and
France. This was followed by eight months of postsynchronization
and editing in Paris and Rome. After Welles missed a Christmas
1954 deadline, Dolivet took control of the footage and assigned
the editing to another. The world premiere was in London, in
August 1955; a Spanish
—
language version opened in Madrid around the same time; the
Paris premiere was in June 1956. There, the Young Turks of Cahiers
proclaimed it Welles’ greatest achievement.
Back home, Welles was all but invisible. He had left Hollywood
during the summer of 1947, at the very time the House Un-American
Activities Committee was preparing subpoenas, to spend the next
eight-plus years as a European vagabond — acting in other people’s
films while working piecemeal on Othello (1952), Don
Quixote and Mr Arkadin. During this period, American
interest in his career was confined mainly to cinephiles and
the avant-garde. The maiden issue of Jonas Mekas’ Film Culture
(January 1955) had featured Welles (as Othello) on its
cover, with a manifesto (“For a Universal Cinema”) hopefully
pegged to Mr Arkadin, but the movie’s US release only
came seven and a half years later — at which point Film
Culture’s cover was one of Mr Arkadin’s oracular,
oddly typewritten intertitles: “a certain great and powerful
king once asked a poet ‘what can i give you of all that i have?’
he wisely replied anything sir... except your secret.’”
In 1962, Welles’ mocking jape might indeed have emerged from
the recesses of the New American Cinema. Mr Arkadin
was no less personal than Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of
the Night (1958), analyzed in the same issue of Film
Culture. Call it avant-trash. As Mr Arkadin’s
decomposing make-believe and unconvincing costumes anticipate
Jack Smith’s concept of moldiness, so the convoluted narratives
and bargain-basement baroque of vintage Raul Ruiz are inconceivable
without Mr Arkadin. (Michelangelo Antonioni’s The
Passenger, from 1975, is another descendant — as are the
far moredeclasse, denatured, dubbed coproductions of the sixties
and seventies.)
The man who made this absurd noir was answerable neither to
studio nor Shakespeare, but only his own monumental whims. Thus,
Mr Arkadin sends Citizen Kane (1941) through
the looking glass — the action transposed to post–World War
II Spain and given a spin somewhere between metaphysics and
megalomania. It is Citizen Kane, as critic Dave Kehr
put it, with “the grandeur turned to theatrical fakery and the
quest for truth deflected into shoddy opportunism.” The great
and powerful, unspeakably shady international financier Gregory
Arkadin (Welles) finagles a supremely unlovable American gold
digger, Guy van Stratten (radio actor Robert Arden), into hopscotching
the world—not just Spain, Munich, and the Cote d’Azur, but a
made-up Acapulco, a studio Amsterdam, and a phony North Africa—on
a treasure hunt for Arkadin’s buried past. The ostensible purpose
is to excavate the truth; the underlying premise is to insure
that the truth stays lost forever. Thus will the Ogre’s daughter,
Raina (Paola Mori), maintain her fairy-tale princess innocence.
This
insane investigation — which Welles intended to open with the
never-explained shot of a woman’s body washing up on a beach,
and to conclude with the incredible image of an empty private
airplane flying over the Pyrenees and falling into the ocean
— was an early attempt to represent unrepresentable power (Arkadin
as Daedalus and Icarus). The filmmaker’s power is, however,
everywhere apparent: the extreme angles, the deep-focus clutter,
the impossible nocturnal shadows, the flashbacks within flashbacks.
Atmosphere! Beyond ridiculous narrative coincidences! Madcap
masquerades — that Spanish party with the fantastic Goya masks!
A parade of lunatics! Much of the movie is a series of one-on-ones
with heavily accented ham actors — Akim Tamiroff, Mischa Auer,
Michael Redgrave. “Wasn’t it gutsy of him to put on that hairnet?”
Welles asked Peter Bogdanovich — implying, of course, that in
Mr Arkadin he himself was working without one.
The great G Cabrera Infante (known then as G Cain) saw Mr
Arkadin in Paris and proclaimed it “the virtual vertigo
of the Gothic... its demonism [and] obscure ritual calligraphy.”
The movie’s impacted baroque visuals are complemented by the
frantic sound mix — chanting penitentes, pathetic hurdy-gurdy
men, Welles’s booming from the radio, even the often awful overlapping
dialogue: “Well, that’s a castle in Spain for sure.” This is
the film where Welles began using an extreme-wide-angle 18.5mm
lens to achieve low-budget deep focus. Mr Arkadin
feels even more wildly pragmatic than Othello in which,
Welles claimed, a single cut might span years and continents
— in part because it seems to have been edited at a near hysterical
pitch.
If Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus recast myth as pulp, Mr
Arkadin elevates pulp to myth. It is the most Borgesian of Welles’
movies. Writing in Cahiers du cinema , the young Eric
Rohmer compared Mr Arkadin to Jules Verne and Fantomas:
It creates something that is nearly impossible today: a
romantic fiction that involves neither the future nor any removal
from one’s usual surroundings... We discover our Europe in a
strange light and recognize it nonetheless... [The character
of Arkadin] is too far removed from the common mold and resembles
too closely the “god Neptune” not to stand for something more:
the personification of destiny, a modern, ubiquitous god, returning
to the heavens from which he seems to have come...
For Andre Bazin, it was not Citizen Kane but The
Third Man (1949) that turned Welles into a myth. At times,
Mr Arkadin suggests a cut-rate Third Man
parody — all manner of clowns, not to mention a sinister black-marketing
megalomaniac capering amid Europe’s ruins. Welles told Bogdanovich
that Mr Arkadin derived from the Harry Lime radio
series he made with the BBC, in 1951: “It came from just throwing
together a lot of bad radio scripts.” On the other hand, Welles
informed his least, or perhaps his most, reliable biographer,
Barbara Leaming, that the novel Mr Arkadin — “The Secret
Sordid Life of an International Tycoon” — supposedly written
by Welles, was not a novelization of the movie but rather its
source. But then again, he told Bogdanovich he wasn’t responsible
for a single word of the book: “Nor have I ever read it.”
Arkadin is, then, its own Arkadin. Leaming
writes that the movie’s enigmatic sacred monster was inspired
by the nameless international tycoon from whom Welles raised
cash to finish cutting Othello. Bazin says that the
character of Arkadin was based on the fantastically wealthy,
self-made financier, arms magnate, and so-called Merchant of
Death Basil Zaharoff, an international man of mystery rewarded
with knighthood. But, interviewed by Bogdanovich, Welles ups
the ante with his insistence that Arkadin was Georgian (“even
his name tells you that”) and informed by Joseph Stalin: “Cold,
calculating, cruel, but with that terrible Slavic capacity to
run to sentiment and self-destruction at the same time.”
Why
such cosmic criminals? Mr Arkadin gives considerable
prominence to the parable of the frog and the scorpion, which,
in its evocation of intractable “character,” has been taken
by virtually all commentators to be Welles’ true confession.
As explicated by Parker Tyler, in his 1963 Film Culture
essay “Orson Welles and the Big Film Cult,” the fable
explains that “the scorpion must cross a stream (that is, Welles
must make a film), but, to do so, he must enlist the help of
a frog” — ie, a producer — whom he stings, “at his own expense.”
By the time Mr Arkadin was “finished,” in the mid-1950s,
Welles had supplanted Erich von Stroheim as American cinema’s
supreme martyr — “a lone wolf,” per Tyler, “whose egoistic failures
have stacked up to make him both notorious and famous.”
Tyler called Welles the quintessential big experimental cult
hero, “always achieving failure yet bringing it off brilliantly...
the eternal Infant Prodigy” who made then independent directors
like Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes seem “middle-aged”
by comparison. At the same time, he wrote that Welles had superseded
Cocteau as a model for the 16mm makers of lyrical films and
personal cinema, whom Tyler termed “little experimentalists.”
For them, film activity was privileged over film achievement,
and filmmaking was understood as a way of life — and, in this,
Welles was their peer. More than Citizen Kane or The
Lady from Shanghai (1948) or even Othello, Mr
Arkadin is a psychodrama in which both the personality
and the person of the filmmaker are the subject of the film.
Indeed, Welles’s false nose, phony beard, and blatant wig are
so extravagantly fake it’s tempting to imagine that his initial
concept was his character’s makeup. (In one scene, he even appears
as Santa Claus.) In any case, the great showman seems unconcerned,
if not pleased, to don a disguise where the seams show.
As the character of Arkadin seems to keep everyone in the movie
under constant surveillance, so the actor Welles dubs many of
their voices. By one estimate, some eighteen characters — although
never the terrible, yammering Van Stratten — speak with his
barely disguised voice. The solipsistic puppet theater that
is Mr Arkadin projects a tawdry totalitarianism —
Welles’ future wife plays the monster’s adoring daughter — and
its collapse. In Mr Arkadin, Welles reconstitutes the
hall of mirrors shattered in The Lady from Shanghai,
the better to reflect on... himself.
Borges famously described Citizen Kane as a labyrinth
without a center. Mr Arkadin does have a center. It’s
a maze designed by the Minotaur.
J
Hoberman
is a film critic for
the Village Voice. His latest book
is The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the
Absence of Communism (Temple University Press).
Confidential
Report Discussion Questions:
In
all the existing versions of Mr Arkadin/Confidential
Report, Welles tells the fable of the Scorpion and the
Frog, the triumph of character versus logic. What is the meaning
of this tale for the film as a whole and for Arkadin and Van
Stratten in particular?
Critics
have noted that Welles has given his numerous colorful character
actors a rather surprisingly large role in the film. How do
they drive the plot through the chronology they offer, the geography
they supply and the interest they evoke?
Mr
Arkadin/Confidential Report was set in the era
of the Cold War when such research assignments resulted from
the paranoia indemic to the age. In today's society, are "confidential
reports" more or less easy to obtain? Does our technology
impede or facilitate finding the truth about a high profile
individual?
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