Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, 1955)

I'd never seen Arkadin before, and I was partly prompted to see it because of all the discourse circling around David Fincher's Mank. That very tedious film seems to imply that everything great about Citizen Kane -- its flashback structure, its social commentary, its compact version of epic sweep -- was the work of Herman Mankiewicz, and that Welles was mainly an arrogant upstart who needed the strong bones of Mank's script to rein in his stage-magic flourishes. This is of course a rehash of Pauline Kael's argument in "Raising Kane," that Mankiewicz was the adult in the room while Welles was giddily playing with his giant train set.

Mr. Arkadin, the authorship of which is in no doubt whatsoever, is probably the Welles film most like Kane. It is fixated on the mysterious life of a powerful man, Gregory Arkadin (Welles), the details of which are filled in by an investigator, Van Stratten (Robert Arden) at Arkadin's behest. (He claims to have amnesia and wants to learn who he was. This, unsurprisingly, is a feint.) Like the newspaper man Thompson in Kane, Van Stratten pieces Arkadin's past together by visiting a number of his former associates, each one leading to the next. 

Comparing Mr. Arkadin to Kane is actually pretty fascinating. Certainly Citizen Kane was a highly distinctive picture for its time, to say nothing of today. But it looks highly controlled and even conservative compared to Arkadin. It seems that one could really make the legitimate argument that Mankiewicz's script was a solid roadmap for Welles to follow, and he did so while infusing the film with his unbridled theatricality. The expanding breakfast table, the shots into the snow globe, the mirror-wall mise en abyme, the sudden squawking of a cockatoo -- perhaps this is where we are seeing the truest image of Welles' sensibility. No doubt Welles, the ultra-leftist, had no problem with mounting a takedown of one of the country's most powerful capitalists. But perhaps he really was more interested in bizarre formalist challenges, the particular way that cinema could expand the possibilities of theater and radio.

All of which is to say, Mr. Arkadin has much more in common with the weird, late Welles -- Touch of Evil, The Lady From Shanghai, The Trial, and even The Other Side of the Wind -- than the relative discipline of Kane. How one feels about this will of course depend on one's taste and inclinations. Arkadin is often jarring. Its combination of Expressionist visual style and rather patchwork exposition -- NOTE: I watched the "comprehensive" version -- is actually rather thrilling, because it suggests that the film could fly apart at any moment. It's as though this Harry Limesque figure, a kind of outsized human anecdote with a ZZ Top beard (which he himself acknowledges he sports only to look "scarier"), is just Welles' pretext for jump-cuts, low angle shots, and a skittering, jazzlike rhythm. It's a "nothingburger," as they say, but with all the trimmings. 

Discipline is overrated. (See also: Spike Lee.)