We have officially reached the first Moleeds number of Shelter-In-Place movie nights. Well, I didn’t realize it in time, but if I had, I’d have assigned this short as required material before the film, so…here it goes.
I’m sure that you’re enlightened…now let’s see if I can remember to assign the follow-up TED Talk for the second Moleeds number!
But, let’s move on to our feature presentation. Mr. Arkadin, also known as Confidential Report, is a 1955 basically Orson Welles film. I say “basically” because Welles actually lost editorial control over the film, which was taken away from him by the studio when he missed a deadline. As a result, there have been multiple disparate versions of the film released, culminating in a 2006 Criterion cut (the one we watched) which is believed to be as close as possible to Welles’ original vision.
The Criterion version plays out in a bookend/flashback structure, but I’ll run through it in a more linear fashion.
Mily is never without a bottle opener
The film opens out at the docks in Naples, where minor smuggler Guy Van Stratten and his moll Mily witness a man being fatally stabbed. Before he dies, he manages to whisper to Mily about an association between Gregory Arkadin, a famed international business magnate, and the name “Sophie”. Since there’s an implication that there might be some serious money involved in this connection, Guy and Mily decide to try to chase this down.
If you start calling me “Maleficent”, I’m out!
This is a bit difficult, because Arkadin is known to be so camera-shy that nobody seems to know what he looks like, or where he is. (A bit weird to become internationally known under those conditions, but OK.) Guy reasons that one good way to find him would be to try to horn in on Raina Arkadin, the magnate’s daughter. You know this is going to work, because, well, otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie (and also, it would be hard to make it to the bookend points we’ve already seen), but in reality it seems like the odds would be pretty low. Anyway, Guy gets himself invited to a masquerade at Arkadin’s Spanish castle.
Papiere-Mâché Quasimodo went to way more effort than the business tycoon, who just wore a mask he got in a box of Froot Loops.
The purpose of the masquerade would seem to be to hide Arkadin’s identity, but just look! He’s totally Orson Welles! And it turns out that just as Guy is interested in Arkadin, Arkadin is interested in Guy as well.
I feel like he’s going to try to sell me some breaded cod
In a fairly tense meeting, Arkadin offers Guy a proposition. He tells Guy that he suffers from a retrograde amnesia – that he came to in Zurich in 1927 with a nice wad of cash in his pocket, and had no idea who he was. He asks Guy to investigate his former life so that he can learn where he came from (which interestingly dovetails with Guy’s quest to determine the “Sophie” connection) because he feels that Guy has the investigative skill and the discretion to be the man to do it. Arkadin also asks Guy to stay away from his daughter, though that doesn’t really go so well.
yad a sedulaauQ evif no eporuE
At this point, Guy sets out on his investigations, which take him through Europe as he begins to uncover the truth about Arkadin by chasing down a series of shadowy underground figures and former associates.
You sunk my Battleship!
He eventually finds Sophie across the pond in Mexico. It turns out she was his girlfriend in days long past, and prior to 1927 they had led a sex-trafficking ring that smuggled girls from Warsaw into prostitution in South Africa. It’s clear that Sophie has no intention of exposing Arkadin’s past.
Raina is decked out in the Versace Wedding-Swimwear Collection
Still, Arkadin has his reasons to try to keep this history of his hushed up, and three revelations bring us to the truth of the situation. First, it turn out that Arkadin is actually following Guy around – which seems a bit weird, to follow the guy you sent out to investigate yourself. Second, Raina, when hearing that Arkadin had claimed amnesia, laughs it off as a ridiculous pretext, and being his daughter, she ought to know. And third…all of the people that Guy has spoken to in his investigations start to turn up dead – including Mily. (That’s OK, Guy is pretty hung up on Raina at this point anyway.)
Guy next succeeds in chasing down the final surviving member of the sex-trafficking ring, and we jump back out of flashback as Guy tells the story to Arkadin’s final victim (yep, he gets that guy too). But he leaves Guy alive – he has set Van Stratten up as the fall guy for all the murders of all the people who could spill the beans on Arkadin’s decades-old dirty laundry.
I’m the smartest man in the world – I might cure cancer or solve global warming! People need me!
Despite eventually being in Arkadin’s power, Guy somehow remains unkilled, and escapes on the last seat on a plane to Barcelona, where he asks Raina to meet him at the airport so he can tell her about Arkadin’s secrets. Arkadin follows in a single-seater plane, desperately trying to reach Raina by radio before Guy can divulge the info about his former life. But when Raina finally comes into contact on the radio, she tells her father that Van Stratten already told her everything, and as a result, Arkadin hurls himself from the plane to his death. Oh, and Guy doesn’t get the girl, who heads off with an old flame. The End.
I suppose it’s not entirely surprising that the the film is quite uneven. Frankly, the whole setup to the plot is confusing and feels sloppy. I’m going to chalk this up to “loss of editorial control”/”film reconstituted decades later from random prints”, but really, until the point that Van Stratten begins to investigate Arkadin’s life, the film feels rambling or aimless…it’s not really a coherent story. After that, it all kind of falls into place, though I think there’s still a valid Occam’s Razor point to be made to its detriment. It certainly seems that Arkadin has the ability to track down his own history and he’s obviously willing to do all the dirty work, so it’s not really clear why he thinks that pulling in an additional complicating factor in Van Stratten is a good idea. Why not just kill Van Stratten (who knows too much – he does kill Mily) and then chase down his disparate former comrades himself? They’re spread all over Europe and Mexico, it’s not like anybody is going to make a connection, and he’s confident (and presumably competent) enough to do the actual killing without being caught. Guy can only mess things up, and in the end, he does.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 