Mr. Arkadin (1955)

Director:

Orson Welles

Writers:

Orson Welles (story)
Orson Welles (screenplay)

Release Date:

2 October 1962 (USA)

Genre:

Thriller | Crime | Mystery | Drama

Tagline:

Discovering the past can be murder...

Plot:

An American adventurer investigates the past of mysterious tycoon Arkadin...placing himself in grave danger.

Plot Keywords:

Adventurer | Amnesia | Smuggler | Tycoon | Mexico

Cast

Orson Welles	...	Gregory Arkadin
Michael Redgrave	...	Burgomil Trebitsch
Patricia Medina	...	Mily
Akim Tamiroff	...	Jakob Zouk
Mischa Auer	...	The Professor
Paola Mori	...	Raina Arkadin
Katina Paxinou	...	Sophie
Grégoire Aslan	...	Bracco
Peter van Eyck	...	Thaddeus
Suzanne Flon	...	Baroness Nagel
Robert Arden	...	Guy Van Stratten
Jack Watling	...	Marquis of Rutleigh
Frédéric O'Brady	...	Oscar (as O'Brady)
Tamara Shayne	...	Woman in Apartment (as Tamara Shane)
Terence Longdon	...	Secretary (as Terence Langdon)

Also Known As:

Confidential Report (UK)
Dossier secret (France)
Mister Arkadin (Spain)
Monsieur Arkadin - Dossier secret (France)

Runtime:

93 min | France:95 min (Cannes Film Festival) | USA:98 min (TCM print) | USA:105 min (2006 Restored Version)

Country:

France | Spain | Switzerland

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Ultraviolet High Fidelity Sound System)

Certification:

Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | UK:A (original rating) | UK:PG (re-rating) | Sweden:15

Filming Locations:

France

Company:

Filmorsa

Trivia:

The novel and the screenplay were both based on an episode in the radio series, "The Lives of Harry Lime", in which Welles played his Harry Lime character as rather less villainous that he was in The Third Man (1949). In "Mr. Arkadin", the Harry Lime character is renamed "Guy van Stratten" and is played by Robert Arden, while Welles plays Arkadin. The radio episode was number 37 in the series, entitled "Man of Mystery," and first broadcast on 11 April 1952. The introduction to the episode also describes the movie: "One late afternoon a couple of years ago, a plane was sighted about seventy miles out of Orly Airport in Paris. It was a private plane, medium sized, and nobody was in it; nobody at all. The plane, keeping its course steadily toward Paris, was flying itself. Why was it empty? Who had been flying it? And why, and under what circumstances, had they left it? Why? Thereby hangs a tale."

Goofs:

Continuity: When the camera is facing Guy and Mily as they are watching the religious procession, he is standing to her left. When the camera is behind them, he is standing to her right.

Quotes:

Gregory Arkadin: Baroness, a fool is a man who pays twice for the same thing.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Brunnen (2005)

Soundtrack:

Saeta

A fun, artistic, insane, and startling film from Orson Welles.

This is a brilliant, beautiful, and almost dangerously unconventional independent production from Orson Welles in 1955. The story follows a small-time blackmailer named Guy Van Stratten (Arden) who meets and falls in love with Raina Arkadin (Paola Mori, who was Welles' third wife), who is resistant of his love for her at first. But he presists and they travel to Spain together, where she soon falls in love with him. In love, they attend a magnificent masquerade ball at a castle, where Stratten meets her father: the mysterious amnesiac billionaire Gregory Arkadin (Welles). Arkadin proposes to Stratten a deal, to research Arkadin's own mysterious past, and in turn, getting a chance to marry Raina. This leads Stratten all over the globe in search of information about Arkadin, including a visit to a flea circus (you read that right). This film is wonderfully confusing, heavily stylized, and also campy. The acting strikes me as very film noir-ish, which makes things all the more fun.

Paul Misraki was a French composer who isn't well-known today (though one of his notable assignments was scoring Godard's Alphaville). I must comment on his score for `Confidential Report,' which is not only serviceable but also a lot of fun, and much of it reminded me of Nino Rota. Misraki's main titles for the film start out with a very bouncy gypsy/carnival-esque theme, then seuging into a slow marching waltz. In the party scenes, he varieties his theme to slow big band cues (Rota did the same thing).

The black and white cinematography is quite a feast.in fact, it is intoxicatingly awesome. More arty camera angles than probably any other film I've ever seen. I can definitely see how the fast-paced editing with the multiple camera angles inspired such directors as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and later Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich. However, what was the most surprising about this film was the masquerade ball, which was carnival-esque and insane, with people in masks mocking the camera, smiling at it, winking at it, running at it, dancing into it, and storms of people walking in front of it. I felt like I was watching a Federico Fellini film, directed by Orson Welles. This scene had all of the madness and carnivalisms of Fellini, with the camera angles and editing of Welles. What a treat!

Unfortunately, this film surfaces in many different versions. If you are compelled to see it, absolutely don't, under any circumstance, get the DVD from laserlight. It is a cropped (yes, cropped from 1.37.you don't even get all of the square frame!), unrestored, public domain print that looks like it was buried for 30 years. Worst of all, the DVD is cut by ten minutes, apparently deleting the film's important dream-like structure! The version I have, which is of terrific quality, is from Home Vision Entertainment, and is on VHS. The DVD company Criterion owns the rights to this, and sometime in the next few years they will release this on DVD, that is years though.until then, this nice VHS copy will do. This is a film I could probably watch 100 times and never tire of it. It's a feast of artistic camera angles. If you love this kind of stuff, check it out.but only the Home Vision version!