2 Mr. Arkadin (1955): The 2006 Complete Version

***^½
Country: France-Spain-Switzerland
Director: Orson Welles

"Mr. Arkadin has an insouciant air of what Welles might have done at a weekend house party if admirers asked him, Could you do a Citizen Kane again?"

—David Thomson, "Have You Seen . . . ?"

Even for an Orson Welles project, Mr. Arkadin has a strange, convoluted, and sad history. Written and directed by Welles, it was filmed in 1954 in several European locations and a studio in Madrid and then the eight hours of raw footage worked over in the editing room by Welles for several months. After more than a year without a final cut, the film was taken out of his hands by the producer, who had it re-edited as a straightforward chronological story without the flashback structure Welles had intended, retitled Confidential Report, and released at 93 minutes in 1955. It's important to keep in mind that at this point—before film studies and film schools became established parts of academia; before museum, repertory cinema, and film society retrospectives became common events—Citizen Kane hadn't been seen by most people for years. It didn't even make the 1952 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the ten best films of all time (although it has been #1 in every subsequent survey). Welles's reputation was basically that of a pompous has-been, so it probably never occurred to those involved in Confidential Report that they were vandalizing the work of one of the great geniuses of cinema.

Just three years later, though, Kane had been rediscovered, appearing in the 1958 Brussels World Fair survey as one of the twelve best films of all time, and Welles's standing elevated to that of one of the great cinema artists. Not to be outdone, in 1958 the young iconoclasts at Cahiers du Cinéma issued their own list of the twelve best films, and incredibly it contained not Citizen Kane but Confidential Report, the mangled version of Mr. Arkadin. Years after the film was finally released in the U.S. in 1962, I saw it while in college, and my reaction was that it was inconceivable that this rambling, barely coherent mess was the work of the man who had made Citizen Kane. In 2006 Criterion released what they called The Complete Version of Mr. Arkadin, compiled from several sources and more than twenty minutes longer than the release version. The Criterion reconstruction is essentially a new film, and to watch it for the first time is to discover an unknown masterwork by one of the greatest of all filmmakers.

0 The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

***
Country: US
Director: Orson Welles

What a dilemma The Lady from Shanghai provokes. Orson Welles is in my directors' pantheon, so I want to like the movie more than I do. Individual parts of it contain moments of great brilliance, originality, and imagination—all the things I admire in Welles. But as a whole the film lacks coherence. The result is that it seems better in retrospect than it does during the actual watching of it. I suppose that's because memory can be selective, focusing on the best things in the movie, whereas while watching it I'm constantly aware of its flaws.

The paradox is that this failure to cohere both is and isn't Welles's fault. His original cut was taken out of his hands, tinkered with for nearly two years by Columbia, and reduced by about an hour before being released. Yet if Welles had shown more artistic self-control and greater ability to follow through on the project—problems that seemed to plague his entire career as a director—maybe the studio powers wouldn't have felt compelled to take the movie away from him and reshape it. Some of Welles's movies managed to withstand such tampering. The Magnificent Ambersons was revised by people who were sympathetic to the elegiac mood he had aimed for and able to preserve that mood more or less intact. Touch of Evil was a brilliant movie in its original release version and improved even further in the 1998 version after being re-edited according to Welles's notes. The Lady from Shanghai was not so fortunate as those two films, and the greatness that comes through so clearly in its best parts must forever remain a potentiality, a frustrating tease to admirers of Welles like me.

The plot of the movie is in the classic film noir mold of the late 1940s. A loner, Michael O'Hara (Welles), an Irish seaman who fought in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, meets a beautiful, mysterious woman by chance one night in New York. The woman, Elsa Bannister (a rather enervated Rita Hayworth, her normal ardor damped down by her cropped, icy blonde hair), is trapped in an unhappy marriage to an older man (Everett Sloane, who's terrific—alternately sinister and funny). Her husband, a rich, brilliant criminal defense lawyer, has some kind of hold over her and has apparently blackmailed her into marriage. She also believes she's in danger and seeks O'Hara's protection while at the same time obviously coming on to him.

At first he resists her advances then finds himself lured into signing on as a seaman on the yacht (tellingly named the Circe) she and her husband are sailing from New York to San Francisco. Soon he is not only her protector but her lover. To get the money to run away with her, he agrees to a very unlikely scheme proposed by the husband's business partner (Glenn Anders, who with his flamboyant performance manages to steal every scene he's in) that involves O'Hara's helping him fake his suicide. Of course, nothing in the situation is what it seems: the true purpose of the shady scheme is entirely different from what O'Hara has been told, Elsa is just as likely a manipulative opportunist as a helpless victim, and O'Hara is soon set up as a fall guy and framed for murder.

The plot is really just a framework for a series of elaborately photographed and edited set pieces. It's questionable whether the rather conventional plot merits such stylistic exuberance, but I for one am willing to accept this as a way to add visual appeal and the veneer of substance to an intriguing but superficial melodrama. The opening sequence in Central Park and the streets of New York, the beach party in Mexico so reminiscent of the picnic in Citizen Kane, the aquarium scenes, the Chinese opera in Chinatown in San Francisco, the finale at the amusement park Fun House culminating in the famous shoot-out in the Hall of Mirrors—these are all justly renowned and leave an indelible impression.

And yet as I watched, I found myself wanting more. While these set pieces can be enjoyed as eye-catching ends in themselves, I kept craving greater narrative coherence. It's clear that the extensive re-editing and reduction of the film's length weakened it. It has a jumpy, decidedly unfluid feel to it, lurching ungracefully from one segment to the next. This air of fragmentation does nothing for the opaque plot. In its final form, the movie is the Last Year at Marienbad of film noir—arty eye candy with a nearly impenetrable plot. In Marienbad that's just fine because it's the whole point of the film. But The Lady from Shanghai is a conventional mystery, the kind of story that doesn't completely satisfy unless it can untangle its snarled plot and offer a lucid explanation of mystifying events. The surviving version of the movie just doesn't adequately do that.

The astounding Hall of Mirrors finale was perhaps intended as an allusion to the convolutions of the film's plot, and the final shattering of the mirrors to signify the return to order from a state of deception and illusion. But the memory of this sequence most viewers retain is of multiple reflections fragmenting into yet more reflections, not the simple reality of the final images. That is in a way appropriate, for even though its many exhilarating moments give tantalizing glimpses of what might have been had Welles been able to see the film through to completion, in the end The Lady from Shanghai delivers not clarity, but confusion—beautiful confusion, but confusion nevertheless.