| The Complete Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report) - Criterion Collection | 
| Actors: Orson Welles, Gregoire Aslan, Mischa Auer, Suzanne Flon, Gordon Heath
Studio: Criterion
Category: DVD
List Price: $49.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (45 reviews)
Sales Rank: 18254
Format: Box Set, Black & White, Dvd-video, Full Screen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD
Running Time: 99 minutes
Number Of Items: 3
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.8 x 1.7
MPN: ARK010
UPC: 037429207727
EAN: 0037429207727
ASIN: B000E1OI80
Release Date: April 18, 2006
Theatrical Release Date: October 2, 1962
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Description
Orson Welles?s Mr. Arkadin (a.k.a. Confidential Report) is one of cinema?s great mysteries. How did a globetrotting narrative of espionage, amnesia, and backstabbing come to be itself marked by these qualities? In the film, small-time American smuggler Guy van Stratten is hired by elusive billionaire Gregory Arkadin to investigate the tycoon?s past. What follows is a dizzying descent into the Cold War landscape of a Europe trying to erase its history. In making the film, Welles was ultimately banned from the editing room by producer Louis Dolivet. As a result, many versions exist, none of them definitive. The Criterion Collection is proud to collect the many faces of Mr. Arkadin into one box for the first time?from the story?s beginnings in radio to the novel published under Welles?s name to an all-new "comprehensive version" of the film.
Amazon.com essential video
Something of a remake of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles's 1955 Mr.Arkadin is a knowing and self-reflective variation on one of Welles's pet themes: the search for a defining secret of a powerful man. Welles plays an important financier who tries to discover his own past by hiring a man (Robert Arden) to research it. Did the seemingly haunted Arkadin simply forget who he is or where he's been? Or is he seeking his own Rosebud--a crucial, lost thing from his life that can serve (if identified) as a mythic key to former happiness? The film, a European coproduction, was made under the typically difficult and extended conditions Welles had to navigate after leaving Hollywood, and the bumpiness shows. But the entire project is really an act of Wellesian deconstruction--it's Welles making a film about the kind of film Orson Welles previously made--and that approach is more electrifying than one might imagine. The editing in this film, for instance, is not quite like in any of Welles's other works, with bursts of linear action literally disappearing between frames, as if the fabric of reality itself was vanishing. As far as the titan Arkadin is concerned, it might as well be. --Tom Keogh
Amazon.com essential video
Will the "real" Mr. Arkadin please stand up? Probably not. However, thanks to the folks at the Criterion Collection, we may now have a version of Mr. Arkadin that is as close as it's going to get to Orson Welles's original vision. Part Citizen Kane, part The Third Man, Mr. Arkadin is another Wellesian Post-War Noir tale about the unraveling of the defining secret of a powerful and wealthy tycoon. Welles plays the ruthless financier Mr. Arkadin who hires small time smuggler Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) to investigate the amnesiac Arkadin's lost past and create a confidential report of his findings. Did the mysterious and elusive Mr. Arkadin simply want his criminal past uncovered? Or is his motive to erase a key missing piece of his past? As many fans know, the story of Mr. Arkadin's post-production and ascertaining which of the many versions is the most "Wellesian" is almost as mysterious as Guy Van Stratten's search for Gregory Arkadin's identity. Since the film is unfinished it does have an incomplete feel to it. For instance, it is very choppy with a few awkward jump cuts, there are lots of annoying overdubs that are not cleanly matched, the supporting cast is fairly weak and some scenes clearly needed to be reshot. However, the gems of the films are so precious, such as Welles's picturesque shots, unique camera angles, flashback story telling, and intricate plot, it's easy to overlook the shortcomings and classify Mr. Arkadin as essential Orson Welles. Mr. Arkadin may have been written, directed and starred Orson Welles, but it sure wasn't edited by him. So the story goes, since it took Welles too long to complete the editing process, producer Louis Dolivet banned him from the editing room and never allowed Orson to get the final cut. Welles, who was known to say "All of the eloquence of my film is created in the editing room" disowned the film claiming it was the most butchered of all his works. There were many cuts made of the Mr. Arkadin film stock over the years, none of which are considered "definitive", all of which contain pieces to the overall puzzle. Fueled by their passion for film, along comes the Criterion Collection. Their mission, to take all the pieces of Mr. Arkadin's troubled past (the best available versions of the films, documented timelines, a reprinted version of the novel, scholarly documentaries and feature length commentaries), compile it and present it to fans in one incredibly comprehensive set letting them decide which is the real Arkadin. The Complete Mr. Arkadin (A.K.A. Confidential Report) includes digitally restored transfers of the two well known versions of the film (the flashback "Corinth" (99 minutes) version and the notorious linear "Confidential Report" (98 minutes)). In addition, there is a newly edited "comprehensive" version (105 minutes) pieced together by top Welles scholars who have an intimate understanding of his style, his creative direction, and thought process in the editing room. This new "comprehensive" version is the crown jewel of the set and without a doubt the best version of Mr. Arkadin ever released. While no one will ever know what Welles intended, you can?t help but feel this comprehensive version has got to be pretty darn close. Inevitably, purists may feel this is another instance of someone mucking with Welles's film stock, but in all honesty, the end result is stunning. So who is the real Mr. Arkadin? No one may ever know, but with the help of this set you have all you need to piece together the puzzle and draw your own conclusion. Enjoy. --Rob Bracco
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| Customer Reviews: Read 40 more reviews...
 Very good September 14, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This film may be the most intrinsically Wellesian of all his works, combining the story unspooling of Citizen Kane, the post-war shadiness of The Stranger and The Third Man, the visual oddities of The Lady From Shanghai- starting with the pilotless airplane that opens the film, the soliloquizing of his Shakespearean films, the later ruthless characterizations of Touch Of Evil, and the decayed world feel of The Trial, which- like this film- also combines scenes shot in different countries for an oddly geo-disorienting feel. While the pseudo-intellectual French cinema magazine Cahiers Du Cinema called Mr. Arkadin (actually Confidential Report- the worst of the three in this set) Welles' best film, and one of the top ten ever made, it is not close to being that, for their choice was as politically motivated as the opinions of those critics who have derided Welles as a failure.
Yet, it's a damned good film, and, especially the Comprehensive version can make claims to greatness, with a very modern look and sensibility to it that makes it all the more galling that Hollywood has never once come up with something as daring as this. Perhaps the recent crime noir film Memento comes close, but that film is internally complex, whereas Mr. Arkadin's complexities are externally complex and fractal. The influence of this film on French filmmakers of the New Wave, but even on directors like Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, in their chronologically challenging films of the 1960s, is immense and manifest. Mr. Arkadin is not only a palimpsest within itself, but in its exterior making and history. This package, and the Comprehensive version, do an excellent job in decoding that all. But, this film is not, as critic J. Hoberman claims in the booklet, a Jorge Luis Borgesian film, for there is rationality, realism, resolution, and character development in this film. It is not wan, nor failed, Surrealism-cum-Magical Realism. It is one of the highest manifestations of film noir and pulp fiction, and as such, has been rendered a great service in this explication of its meaning and roots by The Criterion Collection. See this film, and see a world that did exist after the Second World War, both in reality, and in the minds of those whose warp of it is remembered even more keenly. Yet, the greatest thing about it, as with all art than can be called great, is that for all it gives, its best secrets still remain.
A Goldmine for Welles Scholars and Film Buffs September 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
1941 Citizen Kane
1942 Magnificent Ambersons
1943 Journey Into Fear
1946 The Stranger
1947 Lady From Shanghai
1948 Macbeth
1952 Othello
1955 Mr. Arkadin
1958 Touch of Evil
1962 The Trial
1965 Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight)
1974 F is for Fake
To understand Mr. Arkadin I think you have to understand where it fits into the trajectory of Welles' career. Chronologically, Arkadin comes after two very impressive Shakespearean productions, Macbeth & Othello, and before his noir masterpiece, Touch of Evil. Arkadin is wedged between and borrows from two distinct genres: it is both an extravagant piece of theatre that seems to be suspended in time and a gritty noir very much situated in the post-WWII Europe where Welles lived and worked and struggled to finance this film. It is not so much a seamless hybrid as it is a lurid oddity made on the cheap, an amalgam of mismatched and perhaps incompatible parts, but of course this is part of its charm (only great artists indulge in follies of this magnitude). The imperfectly wedded seams between the two genres, Welles' dimestore wardrobe and make-up, the papier mache costumes, and the uneven performances and acting styles (ranging from the inspired to the incompetent) make this seem like a woefully underfinanced and mismanaged affair. While watching this you feel like you are on a movie set and Welles cannot make up his mind which of two films he wants to make: another Shakespeare film or a film noir. The end product is that there is no end product, just a set of mismatched parts that do not go together however you edit them.
Welles plays war profiteer Gregory Arkadin, the archetypal self-crafted man, who has either disowned his past or literally forgotten what that past was. Arkadin is either wittingly living a grand illusion of his own manufacture or he has unwittingly lost touch with his authentic self or perhaps a bit of both. Since Arkadin's entire existence is predicated upon his ability to manufacture confidence, it is unclear even to him whether he can be said to have a true self. No one is exactly certain who Arkadin really is. He lives in a castle amidst a swirl of rumor and myth, much of it put into circulation and perpetuated by Arkadin himself. His parties are lavishly produced affairs where he tells outlandish stories. He is the ultimate celebrity subsisting on an abundance of life-generating charsima. The one thing that eludes him is that lost or misplaced authenticity. Welles plays this tragi-comic-absurdist part brilliantly. He looks like a king from a Greek tragedy or Shakespeare or from the pen of a surrealist playwrite. Welles makes no attempt to make the Spanish castle that Arkadin occupies look real. It is supposed to look like a stage to emphasize that Arkadin is merely an actor/director producing and staging a version of himself for the public to consume. Welles' inventiveness as a director and actor are both harnessed to great effect. Like so many of the great kings of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, this one has a wayward daughter whose failure to comply with her father's wishes leads to tragedy but only indirectly so. Like Lear, this king's downfall is brought about not by an external cause, but by profound internal uncertainty.
It is unclear whether Welles intentionally deflates the tragic narrative of Mr. Arkadin with the comic narrative of Guy von Stratten (Robert Arden) and fellow grifter and sometimes squeeze Mily (Patricia Medina) or whether this deflation is merely an unintended effect of a frugal budget which made certain casting choices necessary. These two low-lifes look, talk, and act like stock pulp fiction characters straight off an American film noir soundstage. Intentional or no, the actors playing these two grifters are no great shakes and the fact that these two Actors Studio rejects occupy the screen with Welles' creates a strangely disorientating feeling that some grevious error has been made. But we have no choice but to go with it and to try and figure out what Welles is doing or attempting to do. If we give Welles the benefit of the doubt, it would seem that he intentionally cast two second-rate actors in order to emphasize the inadequacy of the characters that they are playing. Real actors with real talent seem to exude confidence even when they are playing helpless characters, but bad actors truly seem helpless and powerless. Maybe this had something to do with Welles' casting choices.
In any event, the underconceived and underbudgeted Guy and Mily narrative intersects with the overwrought Arkadin narrative. Just by chance Guy hears Arkadin's name while doing a stretch of time in prison, and, again by chance, he hears more information about Arkadin when one of his smuggling operations is momentarily interrupted by a man with a knife in his back who stumbles and falls on the dock near his boat. Dead men might tell no tales but dying ones surely do, and, before expiring once and for all, this one (for some inexplicable reason) whispers to Guy information that he claims Arkadin wants kept secret. So like any good grifter Guy decides to see how much Arkadin is willing to pay to keep it secret. To get to Arkadin he heads to Spain and befriends Arkadin's daughter Raina (Paolo Mori). Raina recognizes Guy for the grifter that he is but she enjoys playing with him because hes such a sap and she knows it irks her daddy to have him around. Arkadin knows only one thing is more alluring to a mug like Guy than a pretty dame and thats money so Arkadin gets rid of him by sending him off on a paid holiday/odyssey to solve a riddle that he suspects has no solution. Affecting amnesia, Arkadin hires Guy to find out who Arkadin is. Guy is suspicious but takes the bait anyway. Much of the film is thus spent following Guy as he chases one lead after another from Berlin to South America and back to Spain. In the process Guy meets a rogues gallery of Arkadin's old acquaintances (played by actors far superior to Robert Arden: ie Welles' staple Akim Tamiroff and Michael Redgrave). But Guy begins to suspect that Arkadin is playing with him and that Arkadin is conducting a parallel investigation of his own. And Guy is right. We find that Arkadin genuinely wants to find out which of his old acquaintances are still alive and if all of the facts that can be compiled about his life add up to anything. The plot is no more farfetched than was the plot of Citizen Kane which it resembles, the problem is in the execution. To pull off this intricate narrative puzzle requires the same deft display of technical and narrative skill that was employed on Kane, but clearly Welles does not have the resources here to accomplish what he sets out to do. Without his troupe of actors, without the backing and resources of a Hollywood studio, without a staff of expert technicians, and without financing Welles could not quite pull this one off.
Granted, the Wellesian brilliance is there in fits and starts. Its there in the brilliantly conceived Gregory Arkadin who is both a classic theatrical archetype and an updated existential version of that archetype, (ie he is the penultimate man without qualities or man without a center that Welles is so fond of). The brilliance is there in Welles genre-bending & genre-blending sense of narrative play (in the attempted wedding of the stagey theatrical craftiness that he mastered early in his radio career and the gritty noir that came to be his signature style), and it is there in the wily sophistication of the editing that makes each frame and sequence of a Welles film such a singular experience. Unfortunately, the brilliant pieces do not quite collude into a coherent whole and so the film is best appreciated for the brilliance of (some of) its unfinished and mismatched parts.
My favorite Welles films are the ones he made before this one (Citizen Kane & Maginificent Ambersons & Journey Into Fear & The Stranger & Lady from Shanghai & Macbeth & Othello) and the ones that he made after this one (Touch of Evil & The Trial & Falstaff & F for Fake). But Arkadin is an essential Welles film for those looking to trace the evolution of the Welles' style and vision. Sometimes an imperfect film tells us just as much about an artist as a perfect one does. This film is a goldmine for Welles scholars and for pro and semi-pro film buffs. For the general viewer this film is not as essential as the other eleven films in the Welles oeuvre.
interesting as film history, but not as a film August 20, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Mr Arkadin was a bad film. As with every mistake that Wells made, his apologists have held that it is a great film ruined by the usual "evil" producers who took it out of the man's hands and recut it. The idea is always that Wells created "greatness" in editing. But contrary to all the presentation in this excellent collection, no amount of editing could have improved Mr. Arkadin.
The story is a lame rather obvious remix of elements from "Kane" and "the third man". But the Kane-style flashbacks fail because they do nothing but reveal that the ogerish title character is indeed an ogre. The third man elements end up going wrong in every way the third man got right. The lead american character is a tired 1950s archtype complete with a rotten stereotypical accent with his (used and) dead girlfriend dragged along.
The film really can't be saved because no amount of artful direction or editing can make up for a total lack of a story and wooden one-dimensional lead. There are nice flashes in some scenes, but not enough to make a film.
But as film history, this criterion edition is outstanding. Multiple versions of the film are presented to show the different choices made in its construction and its evolution (or devolution). The mini-documentaries on the project of recontructing the film are actually far more interesting than the film itself. There is also a great deal of historical material about this stage of Wells career. I dont know that the actual film was worth all the effort, but what can be said is that the overall package clears up a great deal of mythology associated with the film.
Bad film, but very interesting as a document covering film history.
Confidentially, Doc..... May 11, 2008
MR. ARKADIN (aka "Confidential Report") is now advertised as a forgotten Orson Welles classic. In all probability this movie in first run was rightly dismissed as a mediocrity. The script is by turn confused and transparently predictable. Welles as the main character mugs for a tilted camera to the point of annoyance and his direction is heavy handed: the overuse of skewed horizons, bizarre camera angles, cluttered sets and jarring edits do nothing but distract the viewer. Peripheral eccentrics pass through the story as rapidly as the blurry panning used in one scene.
(*Plot spoilers follow*)
The wealthy Mr. A. (estimated worth: 100 million dollars) feigns amnesia and sends a would-be blackmailer (Guy Van Stratten) on a worldwide search for answers to his "mysterious" past-- the true motive is to prevent his daughter (Raina) from learning that her father was once a lowlife gangster. Arkadin secretly tails his hired investigator and disposes of old acquaintances as each is discovered. (Note that none of these killings is ever shown.) Once the last link to his past is destroyed, Arkadin intends to either frame Van Stratten for the several murders or kill him. Realizing this, the frightened man flees to Spain and the arms of waiting Raina, where he believes he will be safe. Arkadin follows by piloting his small plane in a race to beat Van Stratten to Raina. In a desperate radio conversation with his daughter, Arkadin is misled into believing she knows "everything," so he apparently throws himself from the airplane (again this is implied).
MR ARKADIN is -not- of the caliber nor does it resemble in any way CITIZEN KANE or THE THIRD MAN and is in fact one of this great director and actor's weakest efforts. For Welles completists only.
Mr. W. receives star billing for his portrayal of a defense attorney in the last part of COMPULSION, a murder story based on the Leopold and Loeb case.
THE USUAL WELLES FARE March 29, 2008
I would rather watch Welles on his WORST day than any other director on their best.Arkadin follows Welles downward,self destructive spiral that seemed to grip him from the 60's through til his death in 85.The muddled plot along with the mis cast lead role turn what could have been compaired to KANE and THE TRIAL and instead present us with a Flawed piece with flashes of typical Welles genius.Bugdet restraints along with long gaps between filming wouldnt help and I suppose the fact that the film was released at all should be enough,its just that we all know what he was capable of,and it was more than this.
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