(Editor’s note: A veteran New England journalist, Lars Trodson is the author of the eBook About Orson, writer-producer of the award-winning short film The Listener, and editor of The Block Island Times. He wrote Orson Welles: Scorpion in a Cage and Did ‘The Shadow’ influence ‘The War of the Worlds’? for Wellesnet.)
By LARS TRODSON
Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin, like every other film Welles directed after Citizen Kane, has, over time, undergone a cultural and aesthetic reassessment. While modern critics have seen in it greatness, some have also described the film as being a kind of brutal self-indictment on Welles’s life and career.
“Greatness harshly criticizing itself,” critic Dave Kehr wrote. Richard Brody of The New Yorker called it “self-loathing.” Joseph McBride called it a “failure.” McBride wrote in a review of several books on Welles in 1993: “Hiding behind egregiously phony beard and makeup as Gregory Arkadin, Welles seems determined to keep him as hollow and insubstantial as possible, a symbol rather than a human being, as if illustrating too literally Jorge Luis Borges’s description of Citizen Kane: ‘a centerless labyrinth.’”
Here Welles has become a victim of his own reputation. The thinking seems to be that Welles had to up to something more than simply making an intriguing, entertaining thriller; his own The Big Sleep. And how a film so uniquely personal and giddily entertaining could be a failure is anyone’s guess.
There are, yes, all the hallmarks that seemed to plague Welles from 1950 on — working with unscrupulous producers, running out of money, protracted shoots, films being wrenched from his control, multiple versions. These seem to reach dizzying heights with Mr. Arkadin, but nowhere within the film itself is there any indication that Welles is having anything other than the time of his life.
Mr. Arkadin is not Welles’s dark night of the soul. This is a lark, a jig of a film; it’s a bright little moment under the Spanish sun.
Welles knows this; his own performance and appearance reflect that. His co-stars also know they are there to have fun. They’re the most incredible, jewel-like little turns. Akim Tamiroff and Michael Redgrave delightfully ham it up; Mischa Auer, gaunt and peculiar, overseeing his flea circus; and Katina Paxinou and Suzanne Flon thoroughly enjoying their meaty, beautiful one-scene moments. Flon can’t seem to stop smiling. She’s having a ball.
Welles the director whizzes around Europe, his camera eye as sure as ever, his famous canted angles giving some fizz to a story that has less weight than one of those papier mache bats seen during the closing credits of the film.
What is true is that the movie had the unfortunate fate to be released in America in 1962, the peak high-gloss period of post-War Hollywood. Everything about Hollywood was overblown: its sword and sandal epics, its romantic comedies, its wide-screen westerns; it was ethereal and dull. Hollywood had finally perfected what it had been working on for the past two decades: perfectly crafted, perfectly anonymous films that challenged neither the eye nor ear.
In that kind of market, Mr. Arkadin must have looked like a dog-eared, hand-written postcard in a market chock full of coffee-table, full-color picture books.
What’s the story all about? A smalltime cigarette and gold smuggler by the name of Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) finds himself at the scene of a dockside murder, and as he comforts the dying man, someone named Bracco, the police ask Van Stratten for his papers. When he says they are on his boat, the police join him, only to find his black market loot. While the cops are escorting him off the boat, Bracco, whispers two names in the ear of Van Stratten’s girlfriend, Mily (Patricia Medina). One name she remembers, Gregory Arkadin, the other she forgets. Van Stratten goes off to jail and when he gets out, he tracks Mily down, finds out it was Arkadin’s name Bracco whispered, and off Van Stratten goes on the hunt, even if he’s unsure what his prey might be.
Then the story begins to deliriously unspool. He meets Arkadin’s lovely daughter, Raina (Welles’s third wife, Paola Mori), wheedles his way into her life, and eventually meets Arkadin himself at the famous masquerade ball.
It’s all very whimsical, and often witty.
When Van Stratten and Mily watch the parade of penitents pass through town, Van Stratten tells Mily they are sorry for their sins (he literally learned this moments before from Raina).
Looking at their outfits, Mily says, “They must be awful sorry.” (Earlier, Van Stratten tells the first of Arkadin’s many youthful acquaintances, Jacob Zouk, that his life is in danger. “I’m a dying man with no money. Somebody wants to kill me… is wasting his time.” Zouk says.)
It is Arkadin who sets in motion the second phase of Van Stratten’s hunt: He wants Van Stratten to find out what happened before 1927 because Arkadin claims he can’t remember anything before that. He’s also trying to bribe von Stratten to stay away from his daughter.
During all this Welles sprinkles in a few ideas about identity, but it’s not too heavy. Van Stratten’s real name might be Streighter, or Streightheimer. We learn here that this slightly dopey minor gigilo had aspirations. He changed his family name Steighter to the aristocratic sounding Van Stratten. Van Stratten taunts Arkadin, since he claims he doesn’t know his own origins, that the millionaire’s original name might be Arkadeen, Arkadini, or Arkapopoulos. Then there is a famous fable about the frog and the scorpion — which hints at the film’s minor theme, something about character.
Welles even seems to loosen up as the film goes on. There’s a scene aboard Arkadin’s yacht with walls and a ceiling that seems to defy gravity; it’s Welles channeling Salvador Dali.
Late in the film, Zouk and Van Stratten get into a tug of war with Zouk’s blanket, which caused me to do something that almost never happens in a Welles film: I laughed out loud. Zouk and Van Stratten become something of a comic team. This is not the work of a man in the throes of a “desperate career,” as Brody called it. This is a man in control of his craft and art in a way very few others have ever matched.
Speaking of craft, Mr. Arkadin is like every other Welles film in the respect that his understanding of how film can work is astonishing. He never seems to put the camera in the wrong place. His pacing, and the film’s editing, are peerless. There’s also that array of wonderful performances that only Welles seems to have been able to extract from actors. (I also don’t think that Arden, playing the hard-headed, slow-witted black marketer Van Stratten, is all that bad.)
Critics noticed at the time of the film’s American release knew that Welles was on his game.
“Fortunately, Welles has gone his own way, and what a dazzling spectacle he provides here for those discerning moviegoers who have outgrown the tedious affects of realism.” — Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, Oct. 18, 1962.
“Welles scenes, as is true of the whole body of his personal work, are often remarkable vignettes in themselves, playing like symbolic pasquinades. His action is kinetic, accentuated by a camera avid for crisp detail, capturing a bit of business… intensifying mood almost to surrealist level… The visual trickery in Mr. Arkadin, albeit often irrelevant, is almost always fascinating just because it’s a Welles orchestration, filling the screen with arresting oddment, with delicious detail with, in short, excitement.” – Jack Pittman, Variety, Sept. 12, 1962
“It is, in turn, baffling, exciting, infuriating, original and obscure. It is also, from start to finish, the work of a man with an unmistakable genius for the film medium. In other words, it is typically Orson Welles. … [A] film, which, for all its strangeness, is never less than brilliant.” — Bosley Crowther, New York Times, Oct. 12, 1962.
Like any good whodunit, it ends with a satisfying double-cross, and enough ambiguity to spark a good conversation. Variety called the film a “meller” — that’s casual Tinseltown slang for melodrama, and it’s not off the mark. Those early critics were looking at the film as it was meant to be, not through decades of Wellesian reassessment that has, in fact, sometimes placed too much psychic and intellectual weight on his works.
It’s okay that Welles made a movie that wasn’t meant to be anything more than a big hit with audiences looking for a good time.
It’s more than okay, actually. It’s kind of great.
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