Figure 7.6: One of Arkadin’s minions spying on Van Stratten and Raina.
Some of the richest, most farcical humor is reserved for the darkest, most pathetic scenes, especially the ones involving Van Stratten’s attempts to hide Jacob Zouk from Arkadin. Zouk is a ravaged figure intended to remind us of the persecution of the Jews, but he is also something of a Beckett tramp and a good example of what Shakespeare would call “unaccommodated man.” Despite his age and illness, there is a human comedy in his wish to be left alone, his intransigent, donkey-like refusal to heed warnings of danger. When he is literally dragged from his bed, he grabs his blanket and starts a tug of war. After he and Van Stratten have inched halfway across the room, Zouk shouts, “But this ain’t the way out, Mister!” Van Stratten then whirls around in the other direction and hauls away at the blanket while Zouk scoops up his clothes with a free arm. Outside, Van Stratten suddenly realizes that Arkadin is about to appear, so he opens one of the apartment house doors and shoves the pantless old man into the presence of a lady in curlers. The lady (played by Tamara Shane, Tamiroff’s wife) takes some money and agrees to hide Zouk under the covers of her bed. Meanwhile, a band outside in the street begins playing “Silent Night”:
ZOUK: I ain’t heard that piece in fourteen years.
LADY: Get into bed!
ZOUK: That’s something else I ain’t heard in fourteen years.
Later, Van Stratten rents a hotel room as a hiding place, and Zouk turns into a sadistic tease: “If I dunt get dat goose liver I’m going ho-ome,” he sings. Sitting primly on a chair at the far end of the room, he chuckles, “I’ll give you an hour,” his laughter turning into a diseased cough. As a clown he is all the more effective because he is in such pain, and he causes Arkadin to laugh hollowly. “What are you laughing at?” Zouk asks. “Old age,” Arkadin says.
In the scenes with Tamiroff, Mr. Arkadin has a more truly Shakespearian feeling than Othello, generating a bigger-than-life energy and moving effortlessly between broad comedy and images of death. But these scenes are relatively quiet compared to the rest of the movie, which seems bent on creating a restless confusion. The interviews with Arkadin’s former associates are interspersed with montages showing Van Stratten talking with people in streets all over the West; Paul Misraki’s Slavonic dance music plays on the soundtrack, and each shot ends with a rapid pan to the right, the camera stopping in a new country. The world spins out of control, and when the film pauses to allow exchanges of dialogue, we are kept in a state of vertigo. In one scene aboard Gregory Arkadin’s yacht, where we are given important information about his politics and his past, the entire set rocks wildly to simulate a storm at sea. The camera rolls at different angles from the cabin, and the two players, who are dressed gaudily for a shipboard party, literally stumble from one corner to another.
This frenzy is reflected also in the editing. Mr. Arkadin is the most fragmented of Welles’s movies, every scene split into multiple facets, with a variety of camera setups for even the most static dialogue. And if Welles gives us little time to orient ourselves geographically, he uses the editing to confuse us in regard to local space. A typically baffling moment occurs in Mexico, where Van Stratten has tracked down the mysterious Sophie, who knew Arkadin in Poland. We see Van Stratten walking across a sunlit, white-columned parapet above the sea; suddenly, inexplicably, a telephone rings and Van Stratten steps behind a column to answer it. Arkadin’s voice comes from the other end of the line, and we assume that the call is long distance. But Arkadin is playing a joke and has come to Mexico himself. When Van Stratten hangs up the phone, he walks to the edge of the parapet and sees his employer down below, seated in a portico and surrounded by an entourage of servants and bathing beauties. We cut back and forth between the two men as they speak to each other, and then, as Van Stratten leaves the parapet, we shift to a wide-angle, over-the-shoulder view photographed from behind the tycoon; Van Stratten can be seen approaching down a huge stairway, from a distance so vast that the two men could hardly have held the conversation we have just seen.
Welles repeatedly uses lens distortions, radical camera angles, and shifting perspectives to give the film a jagged, out-of-kilter appearance. In one of the early scenes between Arkadin and Van Stratten, the two men are shown concluding their business arrangement as they drink brandy in Arkadin’s curiously spartan office. Welles makes the spatial relationship between the two actors slightly confusing by shooting their heads from several angles and by cutting from one extreme viewpoint to another; for example, he shows Van Stratten as a small, distant figure in a wide-angle shot from over Arkadin’s shoulder, then cuts to a tilted, middle-distance close-up of Arkadin. Sometimes the eyelines of the players—the directions of their glances in respective close-ups—do not match; in one exchange Van Stratten looks almost directly at the camera while Arkadin stares a bit off to the left.
The soundtrack is also disorienting, often creating a split between words and actions. Undoubtedly because of revisions and the chaotic, make-do circumstance of the production, Welles has created an unusual blend of offscreen narration and dramatic speech, using Van Stratten’s voice to summarize events during scenes that appear to have been shot and edited for dialogue.
The technique resembles the sort of speeded-up, economical exposition one frequently encounters in novels, where scraps of dialogue are blended with an authorial voice. But the effect is more complicated because we are given a “present tense” of actions and sounds at the same time we are being told about them in the past—a simultaneity and multiplicity of detail that is possible only in the movies. (In some cases the visual track has been blended with at least three separate levels of sound, in a difficult and meticulous process of recording.) Now and then Van Stratten’s narration is redundant of the visual presentation, as happens frequently in a film like Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, but more often the commentary is modified by what we see. The narrative is both extremely dense with information and extremely rapid, the action usually standing in ironic relation to the voice-over. The audience must therefore strain to catch the auditory implications, even while they struggle to orient themselves in space.
Welles’s bewildering, shattered style owes something to the conditions under which the film was made, but it is also appropriate to one of his underlying themes: the decay and metamorphosis of Europe after the war. Mr. Arkadin fits rather nicely Rafaël Pividal’s description of modernist works by Artaud and Beckett; these two, Pividal says, are witnesses to “a world that has fallen apart, to a mankind that is homeless and terrorized by a faceless master.” The delirium in these works, Pividal writes, “cannot be reduced to the simple Oedipal triangle,” chiefly because it has more to do with the state than with the family. In the same way, Mr. Arkadin’s disequilibrium and its sexually obsessive imagery are combined with references to a more specifically historical madness—for example, in the poster advertising Mily as a “striptease atomique”—and if Gregory Arkadin is partly a Freudian bogeyman and partly a lonely child, he is also a political figure, whose fall brings down a government.
The political theme is treated so lightly that at first glance it is difficult to see. At one point Van Stratten reads aloud a written report he has received from one of Arkadin’s rival financiers: “In another epoch this man might have sacked Rome or been hanged as a pirate,” the report says. “Today we must accept him for what he is—a phemomenom [sic] of crisis and dissolution.” This is as close as the film comes to passing explicit judgment on Arkadin, who is never believable as a historical type anyway; he has as much in common with oriental despots as with modern capitalists and can be regarded as a symptom of the times only in the most abstract, symbolic sense. Nevertheless, there was some factual basis for the character. In 1951 Welles had toured Italy and occupied Germany, recording his impressions for the British journal The Fortnightly; among the people he met was a tycoon he describes with cinematic relish:
Herr Fritz Mandel, presently of Buenos A
ires, smoked in silence. Everybody watched him do this, waiting for the oracle to speak again. Finally it did. “If the Russians should march west today—they’d cross the Rhine tomorrow.”
In Germany you were almost blinded by the glare of that political reality. Still blinking from it, you’d journeyed down from Berlin, and, in a break in the journey, you’d come upon this real, live munitions maker. How it brought back melodramas of a pre-war pacifist past! There he was, with a flower in his button-hole, an Argentine girl at his side, a respectful ring of Swiss bankers all about him, smoking a Havana cigar on the banks of an Italian lake. The eyes in the sharply drawn, solid-looking head are set in a questing expression, . . . like the vacuum in the heart of a tornado.
“Wait and see what happens this time,” Mandel again. He took the cigar from its holder, carefully extinguished it, and sat back, staring across the Lake of Como at nothing. An Italian prince roared by in a speedboat towing a mannequin on water-skis. Some Americans at the next table were wondering if their ’plane reservations for home were soon enough. . . .
What was he thinking about? It’s no use saying it doesn’t matter. It matters that he makes the guns and tanks for Perón. Perón matters. And Mandel’s thinking, wrong as it may be, is somehow related to the queerly changing shape of our world. He still had the cigar in his mouth and seemed to be looking for a match. . . . Maybe he was brooding over the third war.
Brooding is the word, not gloating. Zaharoff used to gloat. But then those were different wars. . . . I gave him a box of matches. He thanked me and we smiled at each other. After all, why not? We’ve got something in common: We’ve both been married in our time to movie stars.
The passage suggests Mr. Arkadin in its surreal mixture of nationalities. Swiss bankers, an Argentine girl, Havana cigars, and American tourists are blended together with an Italian prince and an English model on water skis. At the center of it all is an outlandish figure left over from prewar melodramas, a man devoid of personality but interesting nonetheless because of the power he represents. Gregory Arkadin is a more colorful fellow than this, but he has the same anachronistic flavor, the same empty expression “like the vacuum in the heart of a tornado,” the same brooding attitude. Welles seems to have regarded him as a savage, a total pretender to a radically changing European civilization and therefore a slightly different type from charmers like Kurtz, Kane, and Harry Lime. Like them he is a sort of hollow man, but he is seen chiefly in costume: first in a grand cape at a masked ball, then wearing a yachtsman’s suit and dark glasses, then dressed as Santa Claus. Even when he appears in normal dress he wears a false face, his close-ups showing the artificial lines of an ill-fitting wig and spirit gum holding his beard in place. We never see what lies behind the disguise, a fact that Welles emphasizes in the credits, where the camera zooms in on Arkadin as he is about to remove one of his masks and then fades to black. Arkadin is so blank, so rudimentary, that he seems to exist outside time. We are told that he profited from the Russians, from Mussolini, and from the Nazis, and that he is presently interested in air bases the Americans plan to build in Portugal; thus he seems to exist outside nations as well. He is almost a mythical creature, a man of animal ruthlessness and lusty appetite, made quirky by his obsessive love for his daughter. (Like the ancient pharaohs, he is isolated to the point of becoming incestuous.) “It’s as if he had come from some wild area to settle an old European civilization,” Welles told André Bazin. “He’s the Hun, the Goth . . . who succeeds in conquering Rome.”
Figure 7.7: Arkadin about to remove his mask.
But he is not the only invader. Over against this modern Attila, this doomed gothic rebel, Welles has placed a more believable type: Van Stratten, the minor savage. Robert Arden’s portrayal of the role has been criticized, but his slightly brutish, hirsute looks and his repellent air are exactly in keeping with the barbarian theme; in fact, quite by accident, he bears an uncanny resemblance to a young, athletic Richard Nixon. Certainly he is very different from the urbane narrator of Welles’s novel, Mr. Arkadin (which Welles has disowned), and he gives a stronger impression of an interloper from another culture. Welles concentrates mainly on the way the two men clash with their surroundings: we see Arkadin’s plane whizzing over the turrets of his castle while Van Stratten and Raina dodge in and out of a herd of goats on the streets of San Tirso. Later that evening a procession of mendicants makes its way through the village, the huge peaked hoods of medieval costumes creating a disturbingly surreal spectacle; suddenly Van Stratten steps in between the line of monks, his flowered sport shirt flashing out in the dark. Joining Mily and a group of tourists beside the road, he explains that the men in the procession are paying for their sins. Mily (who has posed in kinky black leather underwear in an advertisement for her striptease act) takes one look at the parade and cocks an eyebrow. “They must be awfully sorry,” she says.
Inside Arkadin’s castle, which has been photographed against storm clouds that make it resemble El Greco’s painting of Toledo, the same cultural ironies are visible everywhere. Van Stratten wanders about amid papier-mâché reminders of Spanish art (designed by Welles), all of them jumbled together into a nightmarish costume party. In his bewilderment, he asks a guest about the strange masked faces that fill the room:
THE MARQUIS OF WADLEIGH: All these people are supposed to represent the painters. Now some of us have come as the visions and monsters . . . Goya.
VAN STRATTEN: Who?
WADLEIGH: You know, Goya.
VAN STRATTEN (assuming he is being introduced to a passerby): Glad to meet you.
Arkadin, of course, is not so dense nor quite so alien as Van Stratten, although his desire for moral respectability in the eyes of his daughter leads to his suicide. He is what Raina calls an “expensive gypsy,” a new, sometimes rather pitiable barbarian. He seems most human when he is seen through the eyes of Sophie (Katina Paxinou), a maternal, world-weary female rather like Tanya in Touch of Evil; she carries one of his old photographs and remembers him from another age, when he called himself Athabadze. It is Sophie who gives the film its only moment of nostalgia, offering Welles another occasion for lament over the twentieth century, another opportunity to show the link between a restless egocentric and the mania of a society.
Figure 7.8: Van Stratten amid papier-mâché masks in Arkadin’s castle.
As a whole, Mr. Arkadin is too confusing, too lacking in a plausible dramatic center; it is weakest in those moments when it strives to create emotional interest in Arkadin—as when the tycoon is shown pleading for an airline ticket in a crowded terminal. As satire and spectacle, however, it seldom fails, and of all of Welles’s European works it comes closest to the rebellious tone and the historical immediacy of his Hollywood days. It is in fact a Hollywood thriller seen from the vantage point of a European intellectual, foreshadowing the rise of “personal” art films in the early sixties. Sometimes it has the dreamlike power of a Fellini film and sometimes the abstract, rhetorical tone of Godard’s Alphaville. No wonder it was greeted with such enthusiasm by the critics of the nouvelle vague, who hailed it, in the words of Bazin, as “completely the work of Welles.”
8
The Trial
From the start of his career Welles alluded to Franz Kafka, with whom he had obvious affinities. One could hardly imagine two men of more dissimilar backgrounds or personalities, but both are artists of nightmare, their occasional lyricism mediated by a love for grotesque, satiric visions, their characters inevitably shown as victims of sexual and institutional torment. The gothic political rally in Citizen Kane, the furtive conversations on a grand oak staircase in The Magnificent Ambersons, the mad courtroom in The Lady from Shanghai, the police inquisition in Touch of Evil—all of these celebrated moments are made possible by Kafka, or at least by the modem sensibility that Kafka largely created. They are all examples of comfortable reality becoming as absurd as a dream, of recognizable daytime life beginning to turn into a hopeless, centerless labyrinth.
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But note that I have said “beginning to turn,” for however angst-ridden and fatalistic Welles’s stories may be, however irrational and sexually charged his images may become, he continued to insist, both inside the fiction and outside, that his characters are morally responsible agents in a society of their own creation. The Welles who was fascinated with the subconscious and the demonic was also the Welles who wrote political editorials for the New York Post; he may have been pessimistic, but he was never truly despairing, and in that sense, if in little else, he maintained a link with the dominant ethos of Hollywood cinema. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the Salkind brothers gave him a free hand to adapt The Trial in 1962, he felt a need to make basic changes in the text. Consequently he produced a work of great cinematic intelligence and some Kafkaesque terror, which nevertheless seems divided against itself.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 27