Mr. Welles Comes Home
HERR, MIKE
ON SCREEN Mr. Welles Comes Home By Mike Herr Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, made nearly 10 years ago and released abroad as Confidential Report, has finally come to America -thanks to Daniel...
...In Arkadin, though, the story has a serious flaw: It is ridiculous...
...If it were not for Talbot, who this month gave the film its U.S...
...Gregory Arkadin (Welles) is an outlandishly wealthy and powerful European who, faking amnesia, hires a shady American investigator to piece together the events of his life prior to 1927...
...As the investigator locates and interviews the few people who knew Arkadin in the past, they are murdered, and it becomes clear that Arkadin's amnesia is a dodge...
...the bombed-out, snowfilled courtyard of a Berlin rooming house, seen as a straggling street band plays a pale march...
...the owner of a flea-circus in Copenhagen (Mischa Auer...
...To be fair, Welles' work has been violated before, especially in editing, and this might have been the case with Arkadin...
...and Tamiroff's spare hotel room, which Welles makes the universal sterile hotel room...
...Yet Arkadin contains scenes and bits of business as good as any Welles has ever done: a peg-legged murderer running away from the camera while some lighting trick brings his shadow toward the viewer...
...When he sees that it is impossible to conceal his secret any longer, he kills himself by jumping from the cockpit of his private plane...
...the scene in which Miss Paxinou tells her story of the old days, where Welles keeps the camera on her remarkable face the whole time, getting her great performance down unbroken...
...Despite the flagrant absence of control or purpose, he is enough, more than enough, to amuse and engross you...
...Welles' movies must make money, at least through revivals...
...the play between Arkadin and the American in the tycoon's filelined study...
...It is the same with the characters the investigator turns up: a fence in Amsterdam (Michael Redgrave...
...Even when the film is most pretentious, as in the masquerade where guests come as figures from Goya's Capricios, or in Arkadin's telling of the parable of the frog and the scorpion, there is always Welles, with his compelling, gigantic personality and intelligence...
...There are a lot of elements and motifs here that have marked Welles' work since Citizen Kane: great personal power, intrigue, acute involvement with the past, and an outsized central figure whose ruthlessness, like Kane's, Minifer's (in The Magnificent Ambersons), Harry Lime's, and Macbeth's, is always complex and sympathetic...
...The movie is not a great one-in fact, a case could be made against its being a very good one-but it contains more brilliant moments than any other film by an American I have seen this year...
...Arkadin, made nearly 10 years ago and released abroad as Confidential Report, has finally come to America -thanks to Daniel Talbot of the New Yorker Theater...
...yet no distributor here would touch Arkadin...
...Nor do a dreadful make-up job and dozens of shots looming upward, heightening Welles' bulk and giving the impression the camera was strapped to his shoes...
...the sprawling Amsterdam curio shop and Redgrave's delightful performance as the proprietor...
...and the wife of a retired Mexican general, the woman who had been Arkadin's mistress and benefactress as well as the head of the white-slave ring (Katina Paxinou...
...Welles' world-weariness is a little self-conscious, too, and his Europeanism a bit pretentious...
...All but the last are Old World ultra-comic grotesques, momentarily engaging because of the acting and Welles' glibly witty lines, but ultimately silly...
...premiere, we might never have seen it, and that would have been a shame...
...Finally, there is a constant wavering of tone, as though Welles himself was never sure about how seriously he should take his own story...
...Welles' extravagance, which has usually worked to the good before, catches up with him here...
...a querulous, dying ex-con (Akim Tamiroff...
...Arkadin is too grandiose a creation (his suicide is typically flamboyant, and causes, the sound track tells us, "the fall of at least one European government"), and Welles' performance, although personally appealing, does not help much...
...The original is said to have been 30 minutes longer than the present version...
...His plan has been to keep his early involvement with an inhuman white-slave ring a secret from his daughter, and to place the investigator in the vicinity of each of the murders...
Vol. 45 • October 1962 • No. 22
