In defense of Robert Arden as Guy Van Stratten

[Le Chiffre]

Yes, the fact that it was a small sum says a lot. If Filmorsa unloaded a bunch of 16mm stuff on M&A, then it may be a case of getting what you pay for, but then, Bogdanovich said M&A didn't even know what they had. Even though Welles' reputation in America had declined badly by that point, CITIZEN KANE'S rep was still growing rapidly, and it would be crowned "greatest film of all time" by Sight and Sound the following year, so it is hard to imagine The New Yorker theater giving the US premiere of an unseen Orson Welles film in 16mm.

Francois Thomas is one of the advisors for the Paris event which starts next week, so maybe he'll introduce DOSSIER SECRET with new info when it plays on October 12th.

[JasonH]

His unfettered access to the Filmorsa archives may make Thomas the greatest living authority on ARKADIN, so anything he’d have to say on the subject is worth hearing.

The only area where Thomas leaves me slightly mystified is his position as a partisan for CONFIDENTIAL REPORT (the version we have, that is), and the reasons he gives for it. He argues that in terms of music and sound design it is "the most Welles-like" due to the polish that might have continued after the Corinth that the director presumably had a hand in. This seems to be a subjective matter, as I simply don’t hear appreciable improvement on the Corinth in CONFIDENTIAL REPORT.

Alongside their DVD release, Criterion published an article breaking down the set's three versions in the form of guest-written essays arguing the merits of each. Thomas speaks for CONFIDENTIAL REPORT, and here is what he has to say about the soundtrack:

Above all, the greater coherence and energy of Confidential Report owe much to the way Welles handled the music. He had asked Paul Misraki to write his score without reading the script, seeing the film, or being given cue sheets and timings. The composer’s only guidelines were Welles’s requirements in terms of atmosphere and style. Welles then freely fiddled with the recorded score. He constantly glued together fragments from different tracks in order to create composite cues that would be perfectly timed to the scenes. Only Confidential Report does full justice to that piecemeal work. In several scenes of the Corinth cut, we merely have a haphazard first attempt at music editing.

My own comparison of the two versions turned up limited discrepancies in the score. The most noticeable is that CONFIDENTIAL REPORT removes music in two places where the Corinth had it: The scorpion and the frog scene, and the part of the Trebitsch scene when he reminisces about Sophie. An argument can certainly be made that the quieter choice is more effective (it is the choice The Comprehensive Version chooses to inherit), but it’s not the most compelling demonstration of “greater coherence and energy”. I wish he had further elaborated on the areas where the timing of the music is more refined in CONFIDENTIAL, because while I certainly don’t rule out a failure on my part to discern nuances, his assertions make me feel like my ears are defective.

On the subject of sound design, he says this:

The Corinth allows us a glimpse of Welles’s multiple-flashback structure, but it is a cruder edit. Its occasional awkwardness appears nowhere more clearly than in the scene of Bracco’s death. There, some shots have been switched from one place to another, but the sound editing implied by those changes has not yet been carried over. So, music or sound effects, or both, vanish into thin air from one shot to the next.

I particularly scrutinized the Naples scene in my comparison, and the edit is extremely close. Like, the differences are so negligible they almost don't merit comment. As for the feeling of unfinished sound editing, I can only say that every version of the movie posseses this quality. I find it strange to single out the Corinth as particularly raggedy -- I'm just not hearing this improvement in the sound design, even in relative terms, though I definitely hear the (often inferior, to indulge in my own subjectivity) line reads in REPORT. Those represent the most noticeable differences in sound, but are we assuming Welles presided over all those choices, especially given that the new narration (used to help the more linear structure work) heard in CONFIDENTIAL REPORT wasn’t written by him?

The Naples scene is a particularly ironic one to cite as an example of CONFIDENTIAL REPORT's audio superiority, because it replaces Welles himself as the voice of Bracco. And it's not just a different voice - the dialog is somewhat altered to re-emphasize Bracco’s motivation from gratitude toward Van Stratten to vengeance against Arkadin. Peter Bogdanovich makes special mention of this in the featurette accompanying The Comprehensive Version, pointing out that it’s part of the more “commercial” bent of the re-edit, accepting it as a given that Dolivet made this change. We don’t need to treat Bogdanovich’s take as gospel – he may well be letting his own instincts fill in the historical gaps, and he talks about Dolivet under the outdated assumption that the producer was creatively steering this cut when we know (thanks to Thomas) that it was more a case of him appeasing Warner Bros. Thomas on the other hand seems to privilege the redubs, but it's fuzzy whether he’s basing this on evidence he has access to which we do not, or if like Bogdanovich he’s letting his own tastes be his guide.

It speaks to our big limitation, which is that these two principal cuts of the movie that survive are you might say two phases away from each other in the project’s editorial evolution. The version of CONFIDENTIAL REPORT that premiered in London would have given us a much clearer understanding of the kind of maturation Lucidi was able to accomplish after Welles stepped aside, work which would have at least been indirectly guided by Welles even if he never came back for that final pass. Because we only have the 1956 re-edit to compare to the Corinth, we’re left to speculate what changes – aside from the obvious chronology retooling – were done under Lucidi/Welles and what was done at the hands of the unnamed editor Dolivet had to hire to fulfill Warner Bros.’s wishes. Scholars and civilians alike are left to pick our own poison without the advantage of any real bearings on the authorship behind individual choices.

[Le Chiffre]

I think it may have been Thomas who said that 80 to 90% of the film is identical in all versions. It's mainly a matter of things being switched around or being trimmed here and there, but they're all badly flawed. I guess that's one reason why my go to version has become the Comprehensive, as the flaws seem less noticeable, although I'm glad they all are available, and that Criterion did such a great job with the Corinth. Jonathon Rosenbaum seems to have changed his stance to preferring CONFIDENTIAL REPORT over the Corinth, perhaps influenced by Thomas' emphasis on editing, which does seem a bit tighter in CR, although not all that much, as you pointed out. I agree with you that the Corinth is better, but Rosenbaum and Thomas' opinion carries some weight. The version I would most like to see is the version Glenn saw. Maybe another job for AI.

I wonder: whose idea was it to put those bats in the opening credits of CR, and to re-dub Milly with a different actress (badly) when she and Van Stratton are reunited at the nightclub? Can't imagine what they thought they were doing there, but the wildly inconsistent lip syncing is a distraction in all versions.

[Roger Ryan]

... I wonder: whose idea was it to put those bats in the opening credits of CR...

The cast credit sequence (including the bats - decorations from the masked ball sequence) is skillful enough to make me think Welles had planned it. Particularly, the choice to show Welles as Arkadin just as he's taking off his mask but fading out before you can clearly see his face appears designed to keep you guessing what Welles actually looks like in the film since we don't get a clear shot of his full face until 25+ minutes in. While I argued earlier that I think it's best to keep the cast credit sequence at the film's end in order not to spoil the appearance of each new character, the very deliberate choice not to reveal Welles' face in the sequence is the one thing that implies Welles would have intended the sequence to play at the film's beginning. As it is, I still like how the footage reminds the viewer that Arkadin is all mask (and little else) when it appears at the end of the Comprehensive Version.

[JasonH]

The bats are a nice touch, whoever came up with it. I must say I completely disapprove of the decision to move the cast roll to the end of the Comprehensive Version in order to make it more in line with Welles’s RKO pictures. If putting the cast upfront is how Welles left it, why should we entertain someone else’s presumption that they know better? “Every man has his reasons,” I suppose, but imposing preferences seems at odds with the stated agenda of the endeavor and helps burnish the status of the Comprehensive Version as a “professional fan edit” in my mind.

(I suppose I should be more tolerant of the license taken in the Comprehensive Version considering it is presented as merely an additional variant and that “professional fan edit” isn’t exactly any less applicable a moniker for THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND or the 1998 recut of TOUCH OF EVIL, both of which I’m grateful to have. But since the longest version gets almost inevitably selected first – and perhaps last – by the uninitiated, the role that subjectivity played in its shaping merits, shall we say, better documentation.)

I didn’t know Patricia Medina was overdubbed for those extensions in the nightclub scene found in CONFIDENTIAL REPORT. Those additions always stood out like a sore thumb to me because I saw the Corinth first and the line deliveries for both characters (Arden’s included) are more subdued in REPORT by comparison, so I took the different sounding voice for Mily to be an artifact of that. In the Comprehensive Version this scene is even fuller (while the schizophrenia is simultaneously exacerbated), as it re-attaches Mily’s last line from the Corinth that CONFIDENTIAL REPORT lacks, and it plugs in an extra beat at the beginning (taken from a Spanish variant?) where Mily is made aware of Guy and Raina and inadvertently slams the phone booth door on Bob. These extra bits are interesting in a “deleted scenes” kind of way, but as usual I prefer the Corinth here —its pace is swifter without losing anything of meaning.

I assume Medina was redubbed because the decision was made to reinstate pieces of the nightclub scene after she had already done post-syncing under Welles. This is not proof that the editing change was done without Welles, since he recut himself often and was no stranger to the dilemma of actors being unavailable for looping (it seems to be the reason he stepped in to voice so many characters in the first place), though there is this anecdote from Jonathan Rosenbaum, who had a chance to interview Medina: “…much later she was contacted by Dolivet to act in some additional scenes; learning that Welles wouldn’t be directing them, she refused.” I’m generally dubious of any dubbing that is different from that heard in the Corinth, but the fact that François Thomas seems to feel the opposite keeps the question frustratingly open.

If CONFIDENTIAL REPORT brought back footage that Welles had already decided to remove – and I’m making a huge assumption here – it’s worth pondering why. Perhaps losing all that great stuff with Tamiroff created an incentive to pour some things back in. Interestingly, Thomas begins his argument in favor of CONFIDENTIAL REPORT by telling us “In the field of alternative edits, generally speaking, I don’t think that the longer version is necessarily the best one, nor that the most important issue is the number of additional scenes a version offers.” Yet the runtime difference between the Corinth and REPORT is a whopping two minutes, and it’s precisely due to the unique footage REPORT offers that the gap is largely closed. (If the premiere version of REPORT were to surface and prove to be longer than the Corinth, would there be the same urgency to stress that longer and better are not synonyms?) We discussed already that Thomas considers the graveyard story a possible reinstatement motivated totally by Dolivet, even while we guessed it was one of the scenes Welles lamented getting eliminated. There’s virtually no certainty in any direction about so many of the discrepancies.

An interesting mistake (?) in the Corinth version is that Welles’s opening narration refers to “the murder,” which seemingly only makes sense if the movie had opened with the shot of the dead body on the beach. CONFIDENTIAL REPORT crudely snips that phrase in apparent deference to this. The shot on the beach falls pretty flat in CONFIDENTIAL REPORT, where it appears after the yacht scene (in keeping with that version’s linearity – it’s where it would go chronologically) thus preventing us from sharing in Guy’s surprise when he sees the “last known photograph” at the Christmas Eve party. It’s much better for the shot to either not appear at all (the Corinth) or be shown upfront as Welles intended it, where it functions as a kind of promise or omen. It doesn’t really give away Mily’s murder since it’s such a wide shot and we haven’t met the character yet, so when her fate is revealed to Guy our surprise is still preserved, plus you get the “aha” moment of the opening shot being contextualized.

[Roger Ryan]

The bats are a nice touch, whoever came up with it. I must say I completely disapprove of the decision to move the cast roll to the end of the Comprehensive Version in order to make it more in line with Welles’s RKO pictures. If putting the cast upfront is how Welles left it, why should we entertain someone else’s presumption that they know better? “Every man has his reasons,” I suppose, but imposing preferences seems at odds with the stated agenda of the endeavor and helps burnish the status of the Comprehensive Version as a “professional fan edit” in my mind...

There's one other reason for placing the credits all at the end in the "Comprehensive Version": it allows the footage of Van Stratten approaching Zouk's garret to play without credits superimposed. Now, you can definitely argue that this footage is extraneous enough that placing credits over it is entirely reasonable and, even, preferable, but including these shots without the credits fits in with the goal of this version to include as much footage as is available.

[Le Chiffre]

Glenn said the version he saw had the credits at the end, but once again, we can't be sure how accurate were his memories.

Here's an interesting excerpt from MAKING MOVIES WITH ORSON WELLES by Gary Graver and Andrew J. Rausch-

"Orson always surrounded himself with great actors. Well, almost always. I used to kid him all the time about his having hired an actor named Robert Arden to play the lead in Mr. Arkadin. The reason I gave him a hard time about this was because Arden really wasn't very good, which was a rarity in an Orson Welles film. Orson would be casting and I'd say, "How about that Robert Arden? What do you think he's doing now?"

"Please Gary," Orson would say, "I'm entitled to make one mistake."

Orson had seen Arden in a production of Guys and Dolls in London and thought he was wonderful. Who knows? Maybe Arden was a great actor in that production. I just don't think he was in sync with what Orson was wanting. But once you start shooting you're sort of stuck with the actors you've cast.

[JasonH]

Well by now, we have a quote on the subject from Welles after all.

Of course, Welles is the same guy who once told Peter Bogdanovich he didn't like THE TRIAL just to be agreeable.

[Roger Ryan]

Well by now, we have a quote on the subject from Welles after all.

Of course, Welles is the same guy who once told Peter Bogdanovich he didn't like THE TRIAL just to be agreeable.

I can see Welles casting Arden for type then realizing later that since so much of the film focused on Van Stratten that the actor needed a broader range to really bring the character to life and avoid the one-note tone.

Glenn said the version he saw had the credits at the end, but once again, we can't be sure how accurate were his memories...

I was told as well that the recollections of that London preview screening from former Wellesnet member "Glenn Anders" were taken into consideration when building the "Comprehensive Version", so that may have influenced the placement of the credits as well. I don't really want to speak for the producers on the finer points of the reconstruction, however, as my information comes from a casual conversation over twenty years ago.

[JasonH]

Welles described MR. ARKADIN as "anguish from beginning to end." We know why he would have felt that way about the project’s end stages, but that statement implies the production itself wasn't smooth sailing, either. Perhaps casting was part of his troubles, and I also infer that his ambition exceeded his budget. In addition to being where the production was headquartered, Spain had to be used to double for a number of locations, but the company also traveled to France and Germany; its globe-trotting scope remains impressively convincing.

ARKADIN was not a swift shoot. Of course OTHELLO and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND literally spanned years, but that was due to their start-stop nature. ARKADIN had a relatively continuous shoot that went on for over six months -- much to Dolivet's agony, as he had to constantly raise additional funds whenever Welles went overschedule. Welles was an economical director, but I think on this picture he shot an exceptional amount of footage, which seems to have been a factor in how slow the editing was.

For all these challenges, Welles's contention that ARKADIN was "blown in the cutting" suggests that none of the other shortcomings of the movie - including Arden if we believe he felt that way - were decisive. It's interesting that Welles talked about the movie as consciously commercial, and his insistence that it would have been “a roaring success” if not for the meddling seems wildly optimistic. As a plot synopsis, it may read as a thriller with a popular subject, but in execution it’s an off-the-wall, dreamlike oddity (that’s what I love about it), and that quality seems to be all Welles as opposed to a manifestation of the damage the movie took on after he lost control.

Certainly, I take it for granted that the movie would be better if he’d finished it himself, and I’m sure it would be a bit more polished as well. I’m not sure how much. Many of the shaggy technical qualities people cite in ARKADIN are also evident in OTHELLO and CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT. (To this day, CHIMES gets recommended to folks alongside a warning about the sound quality, and the mix we have now is a substantial, even revisionist cleanup of what audiences heard in 1965.) Maybe MR. ARKADIN was a more extreme case, but I’m guessing the lip-syncing (for example) would be just as dubious if Welles had never left the cutting room.

[tonyw]

Those who remember "Glen Anders" (aka Alex Fraser) will recall his many posts in the past that resulted in appreciation of being the only persona round who listened to the WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast, his tendency to irritate people as well as his deep love of Welles. As Tana says, "He was a man. What more can you say" in Wellesnet lore. But taking the title of Joe McBride's WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ORSON WELLES, perhaps our Brazilian sleuths might consider a DVD featurette in addition to the documentary or last-minute discovery of AMBERSON footage.

Is Alex being looked after by his three (?) wives or gone the way of Kane, Major Amberson, Franz Kindler, Hank Quinlan, and Falstaff?

Perhaps this mini-documentary could be titled IN SEARCH of Glenn Anders with our illustrious Ray Kelly in the Robert Arden role?

[JasonH]

Something I’ve been curious about are the rights Welles had to this “original” screenplay. We know that the script for ARKADIN is essentially a feature-length elaboration of the episode “Man of Mystery” of the Harry Lime radio series, with some tertiary elements taken from at least two other episodes. It’s presumed that Welles wrote these episodes, or maybe nicked them from Ernest Borneman, but he surely didn’t own them. Even with Harry Lime replaced by a new character, this is a clear case of adaptation rather than “shared elements,” inclusive of several names, like the Baroness Nagel, Marcel Bracco, Sophie, Oskar (whose surname “Trebitsch” here becomes the name of Michael Redgrave’s character in the movie), Raina, and of course Gregory Arkadi[a]n himself.

Yet, the credits of the movie don’t acknowledge the Harry Lime show. Did Harry Alan Towers give Welles a license under the table, or was he sporting enough to look the other way while Welles sallied forth? If Welles did do it unauthorized, the failure of the movie probably took the starch out of any incentive for Towers to come calling.