Ironically, Welles’s departure from Hollywood and his fitful, hectic career on the continent were precipitated by the stage musical titled Around the World. At the end of that show’s financially beleaguered two-month run, Welles had gone $350,000 in debt and had been forced to commit himself to three movies (The Lady from Shanghai, The Third Man, and Prince of Foxes). The Internal Revenue Service refused to allow him to deduct his losses, and for the time being no important offers came from US movie producers. Partly to raise extra money, partly out of his growing alienation from America, Welles sought work in Europe, living in France, Spain, and England and filming in locales from Morocco to Yugoslavia. In 1973, looking back over his career in the States, he gave a Spanish interviewer a bitter summary of the facts: “During the twenty years that I worked in or was associated with Hollywood, only eight times did they permit me to utilize the tools of my trade. Only once was my own final cut of a film the one that premiered, and except for the Shakespearian experiment only twice was I allowed to give my opinion in the selection of my subject matter.”
Welles’s subsequent European movies were financed largely from his own pocket and are a testimony to his resourcefulness and ingenuity. In the main he had to work under worse conditions than celebrated art directors like Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini. Frequently his backers were in financial difficulties themselves or caused problems similar to the old Hollywood moguls. For example, when the original producers of Othello went broke, Welles spent four years of intermittent work on the film, stopping now and again to act in The Black Rose (Henry Hathaway, 1950) until he could gain enough money to continue; it is said he even “borrowed” equipment from the Hathaway movie to shoot parts of Othello in North Africa. In September 1961 Filmosa S.A., the production company for Mr. Arkadin (also known as Confidential Report), charged Welles with a breach of contract because they were infuriated with the almost chaotic form of the film’s narrative. Welles seemed in trouble until about a year later, when Michael and Alexander Salkind, two energetic entrepreneurs without much money, approached him to play a bit part in Taras Bulba. “Are you kidding?’ Welles is reported to have said, “I am Taras Bulba!” He refused their offer but persuaded them to arrange financing for The Trial, a project he had been contemplating for fifteen years. The Salkinds raised $1.3 million and hired a well-known international cast, only to find themselves in financial and legal troubles midway through the picture. Just as the production was about to fall apart, Welles conceived a way to shoot scenes in an empty rail station across from his Paris hotel, avoiding higher production costs and speeding up the work. In addition to writing, directing, and acting in the film, he also worked as second cameraman, editor, and dubber, completing everything within the original budget and a week ahead of schedule.
A good deal has been written about whether Welles’s move to Europe was a self-destructive act. The decision, however, was not entirely voluntary. Possibly Welles could have managed his career so as to become a prosperous character actor, occasionally able to find theatrical or film work in America; on the other hand, the 1942–43 campaign against him at RKO had made a lasting impression in Hollywood. He was typed as unreliable, extravagant, and poor box office; his style was outrageous and idiosyncratic; and except for The Stranger he had never made a picture that audiences could watch with an easy, passive involvement. He had therefore gone where he could find the best chances of making films, and in the next twenty years he was able to direct two distinguished adaptations of Shakespeare and two other films that are completely in his own style. In between these projects Welles acted in a variety of other people’s movies, usually bad ones, but sometimes he was able to influence lesser directors in interesting ways. Prince of Foxes (1949), for example, is ostensibly directed by Henry King, but parts of it bear the marks of Welles’s style as vividly as the Robert Stevenson Jane Eyre he had done in the early forties.
As an actor in these films, Welles was usually a “character” in the worst sense and was frequently miscast by directors who did not understand his essential immobility or the fact that he was best when he played a vulnerable or childish figure of power. He appears to have chosen roles casually, out of immediate need for cash, but he does fine work as Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons and as Bresnavitch in John Huston’s The Kremlin Letter; he also makes a nice parody of himself as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and a clever imitation of Alex Korda in The V.I.P.s. On the other hand, as General Dreedle, the pure monster of Catch-22, he is too much like a movie celebrity playing a cameo. Of all these roles, the one for which he is most famous—Harry Lime, the villain in the Carol Reed/Graham Greene production of The Third Man—is also the best. Here Welles not only steals the film but also makes its success possible, largely because of the strategically clever places he appears, the beautifully sinister compositions in which he is photographed, and the use he makes of his own spoiled-baby face. Actually he has little to do but has been given the title role and is the subject of everyone else’s conversations; therefore his brief, tantalizing appearances are supercharged, bringing just the right amount of Luciferian dramatics to the bleak, downtrodden backgrounds of postwar Vienna. There is in fact a good deal of the young Charles Foster Kane in his performance. Joseph Cotten plays a man not unlike Jed Leland, and the famous scene between him and Welles atop an empty Ferris wheel has many of the same psychological dynamics as the newsroom encounters in Citizen Kane. Welles’s “touch” is everywhere apparent in that scene: poised high above an amusement park reminiscent of the one in The Lady from Shanghai, he looks down on the people below and calls them “dots,” an echo of Franz Kindler in The Stranger. A moment later he makes a bravura exit speech, disarmingly confessing his ruthlessness with a joke that Graham Greene has said Welles invented: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” (A few years later Welles told André Bazin that although he was responsible for putting the gag in the film, he had stolen it from “an old Hungarian play.”)
The films Welles directed during these years were infrequent and sometimes technically crude, but as the auteur of Chimes at Midnight he can hardly be said to have lost his powers. In retrospect, his best work was done inside the studios, where he was able to take full advantage of an elaborate machinery for creating fantasy and a series of technicians who could bring his ideas to life. The bitterest irony of his career is that he had the potential of bringing so much imagination to an inert studio technology but was regarded as too romantically individualistic to be supported by the American system. Hence in the European films one sees all the old ingenuity but nothing to compare with the sumptuous illusionism in The Lady from Shanghai or the viscerally effective camera movement of Touch of Evil. The dazzle is gone, if not the intelligence.
Of course in some ways the European films are more satisfying than the American ones. They are free not only of Hollywood formulas but also of the aestheticism and tendentiousness of the worst of the avant-garde. Frequently they gain in interest and charm because of the contradictory impulses in Welles’s personality—his old-fashioned love of the “classics,” plus his youthful instinct for motion picture spectacle. And yet something is always missing, and not just at the superficial level of technical resources. The deepest problem with these films as a group—a problem barely suggested in serious criticism of Welles’s work—is that their director has lost touch with the social and cultural environment he knows best. It is true that Welles was always an internationalist, and, as Andrew Sarris says, he “imposed a European temperament on the American cinema”; nevertheless, his best work was always grounded in contemporary American mores, politics, and popular myth. His purely European films, by contrast, are set in nonspecific dreamworlds, or they are adaptations of classics from an earlier age. Hence what Welles gains in seriousness, he loses in vitality and the shock of recognition. To a large degree his talents were those of the satirist and the moralist, the sort of artist who needs to maintain a constant relation with manners and national types or else his humor goes flat and his anger becomes merely rhetorical. Outside America, Welles quite simply lost the roots of his art, his work growing more introspective and generalized. He retained his brilliantly surreal imagery and his gift for narrative, but except in Mr. Arkadin all the manic satire and punch of the Hollywood films was lost. Splendidly constructed and mature in outlook as some of these later pictures may be, they have never been able to generate the sheer excitement of the more populist American work.
The complexity of such issues will, I hope, become evident in subsequent chapters, but for now let us consider Welles’s first two European films, Othello and Mr. Arkadin, which illustrate some of his difficulties. Of the two, I have chosen to give more space to the latter; relatively little has been said about it, and for all of its obvious flaws it seems to me the more interesting.
Of all Welles’s films Othello is the one for which the adjective “beautiful” is most justified. Given the series of pictures he made before and after it—The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil—it seems almost classically proportioned. The story is lucid, the acting naturalistic, the visual compositions relatively simple and pleasing to the eye. Welles’s characteristic lens distortions and long takes have given way to a crisp, somewhat muted photographic expressionism, and, despite the occasionally garbled and poorly dubbed soundtrack, most of Shakespeare’s verses are audible. Because of the difficult production circumstances, there is less bravura camera movement and more editing. It is odd that so many writers—including Welles himself—should have described the film as if it were another exercise in operatic bravura.
Of course Othello is hardly anti-Wellesian. It has all the Stimmung of his earlier films and takes several liberties with its source. When costumes failed to arrive on the first day of shooting, Welles decided to stage the attempted murder of Cassio in a hastily improvised steam bath, where Roderigo could be dressed in a towel and the air filled with atmospheric mist. The brawl between Cassio, Roderigo, and Montano took place in a foul Arabian cistern; actor Micheál MacLiammóir was impressed by “the macabre sorcery of the place, which I suddenly realize would probably, in the hands of any modern director but Orson, be utilized for mystery-farce starring Abbott and Costello.” The film also has Welles’s typical plot structure, beginning with the funeral of Othello and Desdemona, then showing how their deaths came about, then bringing the story full circle by returning to the funeral. A heavy sense of determinism hangs over everything, and Iago’s reference to the “net that shall enmesh them all” provides a key to the visual design. Welles told MacLiammóir that the costumes should be “Carpaccio,” which meant “very short belted jackets, undershirt pulled in puffs through apertures in sleeves laced with ribbons and leather thongs, long hose, and laced boots. Females also laced, bunched, puffed, sashed and ribboned.” At every opportunity, Welles has used images of confinement. Near the beginning, for example, he shows Iago being dragged through the streets of Cyprus in a dog collar and chains; a subjective camera sees a guard forcing him (us) into a tiny iron cage, which is then hoisted above a jeering crowd. Welles repeatedly situates the same cage at corners of the action during the story proper, reminding the audience of Iago’s fate but also of the way the other characters are imprisoned by their passions. The players are often separated by gates or pillars and are photographed amid barlike shadows or masses of ship’s rigging. Even the bedchamber of Othello and Desdemona is designed like a cell, with a heavy metal hatch at the top through which Lodovico and several others gaze down at the doomed Moor. (As an example of the technique, note the close-up of Iago shown in figure 7.1.)
Figure 7.1: Iago in a cage.
The film’s style is never self-effacing—indeed, as I hope to show, the camera tends to serve as a substitute for acting. On the whole, however, Welles appears to have decided upon a reasonably calm effect, trying to hold his natural tendency to exaggeration in check so that Othello would be different from the ill-fated Macbeth. In the advertisements he told audiences, “None of our settings were built in the studio. They are all real.” Technically speaking it was a false claim, since some of the castle interiors were designed by Alexandre Trauner (art director for Les Enfants du Paradis, among others), and a few brief shots were made in an Italian studio. Nevertheless, Welles was being essentially truthful; he had gone to the other extreme from the stylized, rudimentary settings of the studio-bound Macbeth, choosing real locales in the Mediterranean. The early scenes with Desdemona and her father were photographed in Venice itself, principally at the Doge’s palace, where Welles emphasized the sensuous, twilit canals and the cultivated, almost fussy Renaissance decoration. Othello’s military domain was “played” by a sixteenth-century Portuguese fortress near the North African seacoast town of Mogador, its mammoth and impressively functional walls surrounded by rocky beaches and baked in a hot, clean sunlight. The one artificial element here—and it is a good one—is the ship used to carry Othello home from the wars; its shadow is seen bobbing up and down against the walls of the fort like a surreal toy.
The opposition between the two worlds of the play is emphasized throughout: in Venice the male players dress in gilded robes and pillowy hats, whereas in the African setting they wear simple tights and light armor; in Venice flocks of pigeons scatter from the façades of crowded buildings, while in Africa the sky is filled with clouds and wheeling gulls. As usual, Welles was supremely aware of how the environment expresses character, and he used his locations to show that Desdemona and Othello are as different socially as they are physically. She is a fair Botticellian girl (nicely played by the Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier) whose father has kept her sheltered in an ultracivilized society; he, on the other hand, is a dark, nobly direct man of action, a slightly aging veteran of “big wars that make ambition proud.” Each is partly a stranger to the other, this strangeness accounting for their mutual attraction as well as their vulnerability to Iago’s manipulation. Welles’s settings disclose these facts, even while they give the film a sense of natural air and architectural solidity; indeed a few of the exteriors at Mogador have such a windblown naturalness that they conflict with the artful rhetoric of the language.
In Macbeth the acting had been as artificial and exaggerated as the stage sets. In Othello the approach is just the opposite. Welles restrained several of the performances and sought a psychologically “realistic” explanation for Iago’s villainy. Here again the interpretation runs slightly counter to Shakespeare but in still another direction from the method Welles adopted in Macbeth. In the play Iago gives reasons for wanting to undo the Moor, but they are almost like afterthoughts, rationales for what Coleridge famously called a motiveless malignity, or perhaps for too many motives. “I am not what I am,” he says, suggesting that he dissembles even in the moments when he seems to lay bare his soul. He has a protean quality, an evil resistant to categorization. Welles, however, has made “I am not what I am” imply schizophrenia and has given the character the kind of subconscious motives that were cheerfully ignored in Macbeth. He decided, in fact, that Iago suffers from impotence. The malady is never specified in the actual performance, which retains many of Shakespeare’s ambiguities, but it becomes a “subtext” for Micheál MacLiammóir’s behavior. Welles and MacLiammóir agreed to dispense with all traces of “Mephistophelian villain,” and most of Iago’s soliloquies—those fascinatingly repellent visions of a truly evil mind—have been cut from the play. There must be no “passion” in Iago, MacLiammóir wrote in his diary, “no conscious villainy.” On the outside, Iago would be a kind of businessman dealing in destruction with neatness, but to avoid monotony in the performance, MacLiammóir would always remember “the underlying sickness of mind, the immemorial hatred of life, the secret isolation of impotence under the soldier’s muscles.” Because of his affliction, Iago would develop a hatred of life, a hostility directed as much against Desdemona as against Othello.
The resulting portrait is an interesting one, accomplished with a high degree of technical skill and underplayed to the point that Iago becomes more of a revolting presence than a passionately vivid force. The “soldier’s muscles” are nowhere in evidence, MacLiammóir conveying instead a smallish, sometimes rather epicene quality; his hooded eyes and the thin beard along the line of his chin give his face a masklike appearance, as if he were utterly detached from his inner pain. But despite the fact that MacLiammóir himself contributed to this conception of the role, he was left with vague dissatisfactions about movie “realism”:
Only thing that depresses me [he wrote] is the camera’s inability—or unwillingness—to cope with the great organ-stop speeches, the “Othello’s occupation’s gone” one, for example, which [Welles] delivers so far with caution as if afraid of shattering the sound-track. . . . this feeling accompanied by a longing to see Orson himself, or Gielgud, or Hilton [Edwards], or any fine speaker of verse stand up on an honest wooden stage and let us have the stuff from the wild lungs and in the manner intended. This I know Orson tried in his film Macbeth and people didn’t like it, a verdict possibly shared by the camera, so there maybe is the answer.
Welles seems to have decided, somewhat uncharacteristically, that the movies were too intimate, too “modern” for Shakespeare’s lavish stage conventions; he reasoned that the camera’s tendency to exaggerate an actor’s behavior must be taken into account—good enough logic for most movies, but inimical to Welles’s temperament and his best work. Therefore MacLiammóir was right when he sensed something lacking in Welles’s performance, which is not so muffled as MacLiammóir’s own but does have a controlled, even guarded quality in the “organ-stop” moments. Welles is at his best when Othello is trying to repress his feelings, or in the relatively quiet, determined mood just before the murder of Desdemona; the “put out the light, and then put out the light” speech, for example, is superbly delivered and genuinely moving. On the other hand, Welles as actor never captures Othello’s splendidly romantic self-confidence and hubris, his boastful ability to charm Desdemona and the audience with tales of his exploits. The great speech to the duke explaining how he won the girl (“She wished she had not heard it; yet she wished / That heaven had made her such a man”) is delivered in a near monotone and photographed in soft focus, and Othello’s calm put-down of an angry mob—“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them”—is virtually tossed away. In the later mad scenes, where we ought to see the easy destruction of all this strength, Welles is equally restrained. Othello’s epileptic seizure, the foaming at the mouth described by Iago in Shakespeare’s text, is nowhere to be found. The attack on Desdemona before a group of senators from Venice is delivered with a fine visual shock, but the camera literally becomes Othello: Desdemona walks into a close-up, looking into the lens as if it were a character, and Welles’s hand suddenly enters from the left to slap her face. Because he is so intent on visual effect, Welles has left Othello’s violence, his incoherent reference to “goats and monkeys,” to a disembodied offscreen presence.
“When I love thee not,” Shakespeare’s Othello tells Desdemona, “Chaos is come again.” But Welles’s performance, for all its intelligence, lacks chaos and true terror. When Othello falls into a passionate swoon beside the ocean, a series of dissolves and tilted camera angles are used to convey his agony. What is needed, however, is a naked intensity comparable to Agnes Moorehead’s depiction of Fanny in The Magnificent Ambersons, or perhaps comparable to Welles’s own terrifying destructiveness in the bedroom scene in Citizen Kane. The film wants a dramatic climax in which camera work does not substitute for human behavior. In the murder scene, for example, Welles is reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane after the tantrum in Susan’s room; when he approaches Desdemona’s bed, he does so with the somnambulistic stiffness of Kane going past the mirrors in Xanadu. But nowhere have we seen a sufficient release of the character’s festering madness, a moment of crisis when everything breaks loose, leaving him with this stunned, almost resigned determination. Instead Welles has chosen to make the camera project emotions that speakers of verse were meant to deliver.
Few would deny that the film succeeds admirably at the visual level. The punishment of Iago—“The time, the place, the torture; O! Enforce it!”—has become an image instead of merely being alluded to. The shots of a funeral cortege bearing Othello and Desdemona equal the stylized, heroic montages in any one of Eisenstein’s late films, and they have a far greater sense of dramatic movement—as when Desdemona’s body is drawn past the camera at a slow descending angle, her death becoming a chilling fact. The scenes showing Iago’s destruction of Othello’s confidence in Desdemona are photographed in two brilliantly contrasting moods: first a long walk in sunlight across the castle battlements, where, in the uninterrupted flow of a single shot, we see Othello disintegrating before our eyes. Next, a more fully edited sequence inside the castle, the bright air and the steady fortifications replaced with a descent down a serpentine stairway into a narrow, murky tower. Iago remarks, “I see this has a little dashed your spirits,” and Othello, whose face is seen in a small distorting mirror, hastily replies, “Not a jot! Not a jot!” The Moor has become psychologically unmanned, a fact that is emphasized when, during their discussion, Iago helps him remove his steel armor and his huge cloak. Even in these expressive scenes, however, Welles has held back a little. When Othello murmurs the line, “and yet how nature, erring from itself,” we see his face in a small “Carpaccio” mirror, but the hideous distortion of his features comes from a mirror, a naturalistic source, not from the extreme lenses Welles would later use in Touch of Evil. Othello therefore breaks fewer rules of plausibility and coherence, and for all of its beauty it is a less fundamentally daring film.
When Welles employs unorthodox techniques here, he does so in subtle ways, chiefly at the level of editing. For example, as Noel Burch has observed, he created a “deliberately jerky” rhythm for the film by introducing a slightly illogical ellipsis between some of the cuts. To cite one instance, in the scene where Desdemona pleads with Othello on behalf of Cassio (“Good love, call him back”), we see Welles and Suzanne Cloutier in a large two-shot, the camera located behind Cloutier’s shoulder. “Shall I deny you? No,” Welles says, and Cloutier exits, moving out of the frame to the right. Instantly we cut to a reverse shot of her, seen from Welles’s point of view as she walks away, but she seems nearly a block down the street, having moved much farther than the ordinary time between a shot/reverse shot combination would allow. Most viewers who are aware of such things will notice that this slight discontinuity is typical of the later sections of the film, where Welles gives the feeling that Othello’s world is falling apart.
Like most of Welles’s films, Othello is fascinating to watch; it is even more remarkable when one considers that its high degree of formal control was obtained under the poorest of circumstances, with Welles periodically suspending production while he sought money to continue. The beauty and rigor of his style indicate that he had seized upon a clear, forceful conception from the very beginning and was able to maintain a vision of the whole despite numerous delays and hardships. What results is a distinguished film, but not a great one. Jack Jorgens, in his fine essay on Welles’s imagery, has said that Othello should be regarded as “poetry of the screen,” which in many cases it certainly is. The early reviewers who claimed that the film was arbitrary and excessively stylish were incorrect; if Othello ultimately falls short of greatness—and I believe it does—it fails not as visual poetry but as drama. Welles, MacLiammóir, and Cloutier are physically effective in the leading roles, but they lack fire. Welles has been a bit too wary of his own romantic inclinations and never generates an acting intensity equal to the drama itself. He is the last director one would accuse of taking an “academic” approach to Shakespeare, but in this case, for all the liberties he has taken with the source, he comes very close to a well-made, passionless gloss, a gothicism in good taste.
Welles’s next project makes an interesting contrast. It is even less effective as human drama, but the difference in subject matter liberates him in many ways. From a respectful adaptation of a classic, he moves to a burlesque of his own earlier work, producing a more chaotic but more truly adventurous film.
Like Touch of Evil, Mr. Arkadin has different versions: there are at least five feature films (two in Spanish, with a couple of different actors), plus the novelization by Maurice Bessy and an earlier screenplay by Welles. Those interested in exploring the labyrinthine history of the production and the various textual variants should consult three sources: (1) the Criterion DVD boxed set titled The Complete Mr. Arkadin, which contains the 99-minute US or “Corinth” version along with the 98-minute British/European version (titled Confidential Report) and the 105-minute “comprehensive version” assembled by the Munich Film Museum; (2) Jonathan Rosenbaum’s essay “The Seven Arkadins,” in Discovering Orson Welles; and (3) Jean-Pierre Berthome and François Thomas’s splendidly illustrated and scrupulously researched Orson Welles at Work. (In December 2014 Christie’s auction house in London announced the sale of roughly ninety pages of Welles’s handwritten instructions on editing the film, plus another twenty-four pages of the continuity script with his annotations and music cues. This will no doubt lead to further scholarly complications.) In 2006 I had the pleasure of recording a commentary with Jonathan Rosenbaum for the “Corinth” version of the film in the Criterion boxed set. That is the version I used for the following discussion.
Mr. Arkadin opens with a legend printed in typescript capitals: “A certain great and powerful king once asked a poet, ‘What can I give you of all that I have?’ He wisely replied, ‘Anything, sir, except your secret.’” The legend fades away to reveal a single-engine aircraft winging across a clear sky. Welles’s voice announces, “On December twenty-fifth, an airplane was discovered off the coast of Barcelona. It was flying empty. Investigation of this case reached into the highest circles and was responsible for the fall of at least one European government. This picture is a fictionalized account of the events leading up to the murder, and the appearance last Christmas morning of the empty plane.” The credits then appear (according to Peter Cowie, Welles intended to show them against a background of frightened bats flying in all directions, which would have been a perfect metaphor for the rest of the movie), and at their conclusion we see a young man (Robert Arden) crossing a snowy plaza in Zurich. He walks up an old stairway while the camera tracks back and away from him.
Upstairs in an attic filled with decaying mementos of Nazi Germany and an upside-down painting of Hitler, the young man encounters a consumptive Jew named Jacob Zouk (Akim Tamiroff). Identifying himself as Guy Van Stratten, he tries desperately to make Zouk come away with him; first he babbles about a man named Arkadin and then pauses to explain what has happened in recent months. The movie now becomes a series of flashbacks within a flashback, narrated by Van Stratten’s offscreen voice.
It seems Van Stratten is an uprooted American who has been earning a living smuggling cigarettes in the European black market. One evening in Naples, he says, he saw the police shoot down a man on the docks and heard the dying man whisper the name “Arkadin.” Hoping to use this flimsy evidence for blackmail, he sought out the fabulously wealthy armaments king Gregory Arkadin (Welles) at a castle in Spain. To gain an audience, he romanced the man’s daughter, Raina (Paola Mori, Welles’s third wife). Although Van Stratten’s blackmail attempt was a clumsy failure, Arkadin gave him a job anyway, devising a fantastic quest that would keep him as far as possible from the girl. Claiming to remember nothing before 1927, when he found himself on a street in Zurich with two hundred thousand Swiss francs in his pocket, Arkadin proposed an investigation into his own past, a search that would ultimately take Van Stratten to three continents. But Van Stratten was more competent and determined than Arkadin realized. Gradually he uncovered the tycoon’s secret history as a white slaver in Poland. When Arkadin learned of this discovery, he set about murdering everyone who had known him in the old days, and as a last stroke he planned to kill Van Stratten himself.
At this point we return to the loft in Zurich, where Van Stratten tells Zouk that between them they are the only ones left who know Arkadin’s true identity. There follows a series of darkly comic attempts to hide Zouk from his potential killer; the attempts fail, and Zouk is knifed. Realizing that he will be the next to die, Van Stratten flies to Arkadin’s daughter in Spain, where he plans to tell her the whole story. By luck he arrives ahead of his pursuer. Believing that Raina has been told the truth, Arkadin commits suicide by leaping from his private plane. Van Stratten is left standing in a Barcelona airport, as penniless as he was at the beginning of his adventure, while Raina drives disconsolately back to town.
I have summarized these events in some detail because Mr. Arkadin is an unusually frenetic and bewildering movie, its labyrinthine plot further obscured by awkward dubbing of the actors’ voices, its continuity disturbed by Welles’s blithe refusal to obey the laws of classical editing. In many ways it is a deliberately confusing, low-budget mixture of Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai, and The Third Man: against the background of postwar Europe, a search is conducted for the secret of a rich man’s life; we begin with a mysterious death and return to the same point, having discovered, through flashbacks, a tycoon’s crimes and the identity he has tried to keep hidden. But Arkadin as a character is profoundly uninteresting. He lacks the psychological fascination, the contradictory personality, the historical validity of a Charles Foster Kane or a Harry Lime. In outward form his story follows the same “tragic” curve as theirs, yet the scenes of his discovery and death are emotionally empty. He seems hardly more than a bombastic figure in costume who gives Welles an excuse for the rest of the movie, and if one admires Mr. Arkadin as I do, then one looks for its power in something other than conventionally realistic characterizations or even a plausible story. In its own way it is as unorthodox a film as the Welles Macbeth, but it is photographed in real places and takes itself less seriously. An effective but often tongue-in-cheek variation on the psychological thriller, it reduces the Kane plot almost to the level of archetypes, becoming a sort of hallucinatory fable; even more interesting, it links its quasi-Freudian theme to a vision of society, a satiric portrait of the world after the war, showing a flotsam of international gypsies living in the ruins of Western civilization.
One of the impressions that Arkadin registers most strongly is of a dizzying montage, a kaleidoscope of exotic settings and grotesque cameo performances. Slightly ahead of his former associate Mike Todd, with this film Welles created his own perverse version of Around the World, a mad journey that leads us past a series of well-known performers: Mischa Auer as a flea trainer in a Copenhagen circus; Peter van Eyck as a fastidious black marketeer in Tangiers; Michael Redgrave as a homosexual fence in Amsterdam; Suzanne Flon as a Polish aristocrat reduced to working as a vendeuse in Paris; Katina Paxinou as the poker-playing wife of a government official in Mexico; and, most impressive of them all, Akim Tamiroff in the role of the former dope peddler Jacob Zouk. According to the script, all of these characters were once in Poland, most of them having been witnesses to Arkadin’s criminal life there in the twenties. When they appear, however, they produce a crazy quilt of accents in wildly different settings, and Welles has created a still more disjointed effect by occasionally dubbing his own voice in place of theirs.
The protagonist of the film, Van Stratten, is an American ne’er-do-well who speaks movie gangsterese, his dialogue filled with mispronunciations like “aminesia.” His investigation into Arkadin’s past introduces him to nearly a dozen minor characters, whose faces keep looming like apparitions in a nightmare. Consider, for example, the small gallery reproduced here (see figs. 7.2 through 7.5). In barely concealed mythical terms, Van Stratten is a knight trying to rescue a fair lady from an ogre in a castle, and these faces are the monsters he encounters on his quest. In an equally displaced but more clinical sense, the faces are cathected objects, symptoms of sexual anxiety, and the movie plays indirectly on the theme of a “confidential report” into the unconscious. Van Stratten is a young man caught up in a contest of masculinity with the powerful Arkadin; the two are rivals for power and for the love of Raina, and by working his way back to a sort of primal scene Van Stratten hopes to replace the kingly older man. “Maybe I’ll be an Arkadin some day,” he says, in one of the many places where a parallel between him and his opponent is stressed. Hence one of the most powerful shots in the movie—actually it appears twice—is designed to suggest a journey into a psychic heart of darkness: Van Stratten crosses a snowy street in Zurich, walking up a stairwell while the camera retreats backward into a dark corridor, as if into a cave or a womb. The lighted archway of the stairs becomes a tiny square of light at the corner of the screen, resembling the old-fashioned iris that closes the snow scene in The Magnificent Ambersons, except that here the entire image shrinks into sinister blackness.
Figures 7.2–7.5: Minor characters’ faces loom like apparitions in Mr. Arkadin.
Of course the “primal scene” turns out to be rather banal, the movie generating its most impressive effects at the level of imagery rather than content. As with most of his other films, Welles uses Freudian expressionism in a teasing, half-conscious way, constructing the story as a devious, defensive puzzle, a conjuring trick that plays upon certain anxieties without naming them directly. The characters are so broadly drawn that they suggest various symbolic possibilities: Arkadin and Van Stratten resemble the antagonists in a “family drama,” and because one is American while the other is Slavic, they also vaguely connote figures in a Cold War allegory. In the most general sense, they are like the scorpion and the frog in the little fable Arkadin tells his party guests. One day, the story goes, a scorpion persuaded a frog to carry him across a river; midway across, the scorpion stung the frog and drowned himself. When the dying frog complained that “there is no logic in this,” the scorpion replied, “I know . . . it’s my character.” The moral, as in Welles’s other films, seems to be that life is determined by irrational principles. In this case the frog manages to survive, but toward the end his antagonist tells him, “You didn’t know what you were asking for.”
Like any assault on the surface logic and reasonableness of things, Mr. Arkadin generates a nervous humor. It resembles The Lady from Shanghai in being narrated by a frog-witted, sometimes dumbfounded protagonist whose reactions heighten the zany unreality of events. Nearly always there is a tension between Van Stratten’s clipped, world-weary commentary—which falls squarely in the tradition of the private-eye story—and the surreal quality of the imagery. For example, when Van Stratten remarks that Arkadin spied on him and Raina, we see the couple cycling through a forest in Spain; Welles then cuts to the shot reproduced in figure 7.6, showing one of the tycoon’s well-dressed minions peeping out from behind a slender birch tree. Much of the film is played in this farcical style, as if the world were making Van Stratten the victim of a practical joke. He bumps into a stuffed armadillo in Trebitsch’s junk shop, where the proprietor keeps trying to sell him a rusted “teleoscope”; he is peeped at through a magnifying glass by a flea-training “Professor,” who tells him (in the voice of Orson Welles), “after twenty-thousand years murder is a business that is still in the hands of amateurs”; he is quizzed by a silly German policeman (Gert Frobe), who shouts in broken English, “It’s very interesting to learn how you that knew!” In the midst of his desperate attempt to escape Arkadin, he is blackmailed by Zouk, who insists on being given a hot goose liver for Christmas dinner; at that very moment, a cuckoo clock chimes on the wall behind Van Stratten’s head.
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 Aires, 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.”
