At the End of the Street in the Shadow
Page 23
A lost English-language version of Mr. Arkadin, titled Confidential Report, had premiered in London in August 1955.8 Another, probably slightly different, version – also now vanished – went into general release in the United Kingdom in November.9 There are at least two surviving Spanish-language versions featuring Rivelles and López Heredia: one that strangely misattributes Robert Arden’s performance to ‘Mark Sharpe’ and a later shorter version – the official Spanish release – which miscredits him as ‘Bob Harden’.10 A revised English-language version, also called Confidential Report, was released by Warner Bros. in Europe in the spring of 1956. This version has also survived. By this version much of the flashback structure, framed by a conversation between the characters Guy Van Stratten and Jakob Zouk, had been altered.11
In the very early 1960s the young American director Peter Bogdanovich investigated the holdings of a Hollywood television syndication company, M. & A. Alexander, and discovered a version of Mr. Arkadin that would become known as the ‘Corinth’ version, an early edit of mysterious origin that retained the flashback structure. Another US version, a crude reassembly in chronological order, lapsed into the public domain and for a long period was the most accessible version to the American public.12
The film (in its numerous variant versions) was not commercially or critically successful. The deep friendship of Welles and Dolivet may not have been irretrievably destroyed by the failure of the project, but for the following period their relationship was tumultuous. In 1958 Filmorsa unsuccessfully sued Welles for his behaviour during the production.13
As with many Welles films, determining what is the director’s own work and what was compromised or reworked by the producer is difficult. Moreover, only some of Mr. Arkadin’s many variant versions are easily accessible. The three versions readily available are the ‘Corinth’, the 1956 European Confidential Report, and a posthumously assembled hybrid version called the ‘Comprehensive Version’, the work of Stefan Drössler of the Filmmuseum München and Claude Bertemes of the Luxembourg Cinémathèque.14
To add a little more to the elusiveness of a definitive Arkadin, there were also two versions published as prose fiction, both attributed to Welles’s authorship. An obscure, very short, and not particularly effective five-part serial appeared in consecutive August 1955 issues of the UK’s Daily Express to promote the film. The French novelisation, Monsieur Arkadin, serialised in France-Soir and published in book form by Gallimard in 1955, was attributed to Welles but actually ghostwritten by his French associate Maurice Bessy. The French novelisation was anonymously translated into English and published in the United States and United Kingdom in 1956 under Welles’s name.15 These publishing projects, like Bessy’s earlier French novelisation of Welles’s unmade script V.I.P. as Une Grosse Légume (1953), were part of Filmorsa’s scheme to raise money for its doomed ventures.16
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Mr. Arkadin had a complicated genesis. It’s titular tycoon character led it to be compared unfavourably to Citizen Kane – a European self-parody or inferior knock-off, as John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953) was to his The Maltese Falcon. But Arkadin is actually a distant cousin – or bastard step-nephew – of the very successful Third Man and is positioned within the generic lineage of the serious thriller, albeit in often bafflingly idiosyncratic and not particularly serious ways. Perhaps this tangential connection to a commercially successful property led Welles to claim in retrospect, rather bizarrely, that Arkadin had had the potential to be “a very popular film, a commercial film that everyone would have liked”.17 Things didn’t work out that way. During post-production, Welles said, “it pretends to be a thriller – and it isn’t”.18
The Third Man had revived the serious thriller in the political context of postwar Europe. Graham Greene wrote it as a novella in preparation for his screenplay. Welles filmed the bulk of his performance as Harry Lime in Vienna in late 1948 as he scouted locations and made test shots for Othello.19 The Third Man’s commercial and critical success made Welles even more famous, particularly in Europe.
The setting of The Third Man is the rubblescape of postwar Vienna, demarcated into zones by the Allied forces. The American Harry Lime, apparently dead at the outset, turns out to be a remorseless dealer in black market penicillin. His naive American friend Rollo Martin is confronted by his friend’s ruthless criminality and sudden reappearance. The film ends with a famous chase through the sewers of Vienna. The expressionist cinematography of Robert Krasker – high-contrast, deep-focus black and white – is one of the reasons the film is often mistaken as the directorial work of Welles himself.
The Lives of Harry Lime (1951–52), a British radio prequel series, was ingeniously produced by Harry Alan Towers – “a famous crook”, Welles recalled20 – without the participation of the film’s original producer, Alexander Korda, or director, Carol Reed. Towers separately secured Welles as an actor (and inevitably director and occasional writer) as well as the rights to use Greene’s character and Anton Karas’s ‘Third Man Theme’ for zither. Harry Lime’s criminal psychopathy was toned down. The cosmopolitan settings – Europe, North Africa, India – could be achieved rather more economically on radio than on film. The episodes were pre-recorded, largely at Welles’s convenience, in London, Rome, and Paris.21
Welles later said the Arkadin screenplay was created “from just throwing together a lot of bad radio scripts”.22 The film’s central plot is drawn from one of Welles’s Harry Lime episodes. ‘Man of Mystery’, the key episode that introduces Gregory Arkadian (note the slightly different spelling) and the investigation of his past, was recorded in Paris in 1951 and first broadcast on 11 April 1952.23 However, a Milan film magazine had reported some conception of Arkadin as a film screenplay (under its working title, Masquerade) already underway in March 1951 while Welles was in Casablanca shooting more of Othello.24
‘Man of Mystery’ introduces Arkadian as “one of the richest men in Europe”. He has never been photographed. Arkadian wants the contract to build airbases in Portugal for what is implied to be NATO. Welles may have been inspired by the US-Portugal Defense Agreement, signed 6 September 1951, which codified US military rights to an airbase on the island of Lajes in the Azores.25 Arkadian knows he will be subject to a thorough intelligence check by the United States Army. He hires Harry Lime, with his knowledge of the “continental underworld”, to prepare an advance report on Arkadian’s past. Arkadian claims he suffers from amnesia, remembering nothing prior to the winter of 1927, when he found himself in Lucerne possessing “only the suit I was wearing and a wallet with two hundred thousand francs… Swiss francs. It was with that money that my present great fortune was built.” Lime investigates, discovers Arkadian had come to Switzerland from Warsaw, and decides to “look up a few Poles” now dispersed over the world. During Lime’s interviews it emerges that Arkadian is really Akim Athabadze, a former member of a ‘white slavery’ and dope smuggling gang in interwar Poland. Closely tracking Lime’s investigation, Arkadian murders the exiled Poles one by one as they are located. Arkadian seems to be a threat to Lime himself until the sordid history is revealed to Arkadian’s beloved daughter, Raina. Faced with such exposure, Arkadian kills himself by jumping from his private plane.26
The radio episodes ‘Murder on the Riviera’ and ‘Blackmail Is a Nasty Word’ share additional plot elements with Welles’s Arkadin screenplay.27
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The origins of Gregory Arkadi(a)n, aka Akim Athabadze, recall the villains of Eric Ambler’s early novels, who, according to Michael Denning,
are of uncertain nationality and, like the villains of earlier thrillers, oppose any nationalism. “One should not,” one of these entrepreneurs of information, Vagas, says [in Cause for Alarm, 1938], “allow one’s patriotism to interfere with business. Patriotism is for the cafè. One should leave it behind with one’s tip to the waiter.” Business has no frontiers, it crosses national boundaries with the best papers money can buy, and it crosses the frontier of le
gal and illegal without regard.28
When Welles announced Mr. Arkadin to L’Écran français in January 1952, he said it would “tell the misadventures of an arms dealer along the lines of Basil Zaharoff”,29 although later Welles described Zaharoff as “sly”, unlike Arkadin, who nevertheless “occupies a similar position” to such mysterious tycoons.30 Zaharoff, born in 1850 in Anatolia, was knighted by George V for providing arms to the Allied forces during World War I, although he was widely suspected of duplicity and even stoking war on both sides to create business. Welles played Zaharoff in a radio episode of The March of Time on the occasion of the tycoon’s death in 1936.31
Another source for Gregory Arkadin was Josef Stalin, who shared the character’s Georgian heritage. Welles elaborated that Arkadin was
cold, calculating, cruel, but with that terrible Slavic capacity to run to sentiment and self-destruction at the same time. The beard came from a wig-maker and the character came partly from Stalin and partly from a lot of Russians I’ve known.32
Welles more generally reflected that
Arkadin is the expression of a certain European world. He could have been Greek, Russian, Georgian. It’s as if he had come from some wild area to settle in an old European civilization, and were using the energy and the intelligence natural to the Barbarian out to conquer European civilization, or Ghengis Khan attacking the civilization of China. And this kind of character is admirable; it’s only Arkadin’s ideology which is detestable, but not his mind, because he’s courageous, passionate, and I think it’s really impossible to detest a passionate man.33
This thoughtfulness might suggest that in Gregory Arkadin Welles had created a tycoon of human complexity, a character with an emotional life as richly conceived as Charles Foster Kane’s. On the contrary, Arkadin is played by Welles with extreme artifice. His makeup, beard, hair, costumes, and accent are bizarre and affected. The performance is often singled out as the weakest aspect of the film.
Orson Welles as Gregory Arkadin
A key difference between ‘Man of Mystery’ and the film is the character of the investigator. Harry Lime is not simply renamed for legal reasons; he is transformed into Guy Van Stratten, a coarse and naive American “running American cigarettes into Italy”, far less cosmopolitan and wily than Harry Lime. Robert Arden’s performance as Van Stratten has also been widely criticised as inadequate. Jonathan Rosenbaum has defended Arden, locating the problem more in “the unsavoriness and obnoxiousness of the character rather than the performance itself”; Van Stratten is intended to be unattractive while “occupy[ing] the space normally reserved for charismatic heroes”.34 The character seems to have been reconsidered through successive drafts of Welles’s screenplay. The Masquerade draft, completed on 23 March 1953, has a European hero named ‘Guy Dumesnil’. The Van Stratten who narrates the English translation of Bessy’s Monsieur Arkadin – apparently based on a Welles script draft later than Masquerade but predating the shooting script – is worldly and sardonic.35
The mood of artificiality is enhanced by the casting of supporting actors outside the ethnicity and mother tongue of their characters. The Jakob Zouk character provides the framing conversation with Van Stratten in most surviving versions, an invention by Welles early during shooting. In the European Confidential Report of 1956, Van Stratten’s voice-over refers to Zouk as “a petty racketeer, a jailbird”. In the ‘Corinth’ version, Zouk characterises his release as the jail wanting “to save themselves the price of the coffin”. Although there are hints that Zouk is a Polish Jew – in the ‘Corinth’ he throws out such Yiddish reduplications as “gang schmang” and “killer schmiller” – it is inconceivable that a Jew would have emerged from a Munich prison circa 1954 after a fourteen-year stretch. Zouk is played by Akim Tamiroff, the brilliant Armenian comic actor who throughout his international film career specialised in ‘ethnic’ roles. For Welles alone he played an Italian gangster in Touch of Evil, a Mitteleuropean in The Trial, and Sancho Panza in Don Quixote.
The Polish diaspora characters were cast from all over Europe. Peter Van Eyck, who played Thaddeus, came closest to the character’s source; he was born in Pomerania, historically part of Germany but post-1945 located in Poland. The others are played by an Englishman (Michael Redgrave), a Hungarian (Frederick O’Brady), a Russian (Mischa Auer), a Greek (Katina Paxinou), and an ethnic Armenian of obscure birth (Grégoire Aslan). Susanne Flon, who plays the Baroness Nagel, was French. Welles had originally intended to cast the Swedish Ingrid Bergman as the Baroness and the German Marlene Dietrich as Sophie.36
Welles later claimed, “I wanted to make a work in the spirit of Dickens, with characters so dense that they appear as archetypes.”37 Critic William C. Simon remarks on the presentation of the film’s characters through “hyperbolic caricature”. Referring to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘social speech types’, Simon notes how in Arkadin these “speech types have a set of sociopolitical associations”:
Every character … speaks their dialogue with a pronounced accent. […] Their accents are drawn from conventionalised literary or social discourses of which there are a tremendous variety in the film. […] [A]ll evoke a set of associations related to a particular culture by its literary and popular mythology. Especially significant is the notion of Eastern European world-weariness, a tremendous sense of philosophical resignation and ennui that animates all the characters in the film.38
In Welles’s films, saudade for vanished times and places is typically expressed in tender anecdotal monologues or by symbolic objects such as Rosebud. In addition to his numerous other foreign affinities, Welles was particularly fond of an antiquated Mitteleurope – particularly of the self-inventing Hungarians. The Polish characters in Mr. Arkadin are variously exiled to Munich, Naples, Paris, Mexico City, Acapulco, Tangier, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam; Van Stratten’s interviews provide some of these lowlife refugees with the opportunity to voice their nostalgia for interwar Warsaw. Sophie, the former gang leader now married to a grotesquely mugging Mexican general, is particularly haunted by the memory of her Warsaw days with the dashing young Arkadin/Athabadze: “I was crazy in love with him, mister!” she says, and later clutches her photograph album to her chest. And if there is a Rosebud in Mr. Arkadin, it is Jakob Zouk’s traditional Christmas goose liver – “with applesauce, mashed potatoes, and gravy”. Close to death, he names that dish, traditionally most popular in Hungary, as the price of allowing Van Stratten to save his life.
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To add to the artificial mood, the first few minutes of all versions of the film – and the European Confidential Report in particular – present a startling clash of modes. The opening quotation from Plutarch, about a poet who is willing to accept any gift from a powerful king except the burden of a secret, promises a fable; Welles’s narration over the aerial image of a pilotless plane purports to introduce a “fictionalised reconstruction” of scandalous true events; the credits, a montage of the colourful dramatis personae at their quirkiest, suggests a carnival of grotesques; and then Van Stratten’s working-class American voice-over evokes the atmosphere of pulpy hardboiled detective stories. Rosenbaum has cited the stylistic mishmash in Arkadin as an influence on the imminent French New Wave.39 The film was indeed praised in contemporary reviews by François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, and in 1958 the critics of Cahiers du cinéma improbably selected the European release of Confidential Report as one of the twelve best movies of all time.40
Simon channels Bakhtin to explain Welles’s method:
Clearly, what Welles is doing in the opening moments of the film is to put into dialogic contact three diverse discourses: the fairy tale or legend of the paratext, the documentary reconstruction of the opening spoken lines, and a delirious hyperbolic aesthetic mode associated through the music score with a generalized Eastern European sensibility that will in fact prove to be the dominant mode of the film. This clash of discourses constitutes a positing of filmic heteroglossia and raises questions about the film’s
conception. Will it be a fairy tale? Will it be a docudrama? Will it be a most elaborate Polish joke?41
Paul Misraki’s score is a collection of pastiches including Salvation Army brass band music (an original theme and ‘Silent Night’) and a buoyant orchestral dance theme with an Eastern European flavour. Misraki wrote the music without having read the screenplay or seen a cut of the film. Welles spliced together segments of Misraki’s recorded cues in abrupt juxtapositions.42
So these are Welles’s complicated generic, textual, and historical sources, the unconventional stylistic choices, and the production disasters surrounding Mr. Arkadin. In combination these factors left to posterity a confusing set of variant versions, none of them finished or approved by the director. And yet Welles’s political critique of postwar Europe is still palpable across the versions. By updating the ‘serious thriller’ to the era of international air travel and the Iron Curtain – unprecedented speed and freedom of movement for the privileged, authoritarian restriction for the majority – Welles illustrates the new ways that space is controlled and experienced in a dizzying vision of erased distances that anticipates the internationalism of the James Bond films of the 1960s.