Note: For the purpose of this review I watched the so-called “comprehensive” edition released in 2006.
Director: Orson Welles
Cast: Orson Welles, Robert Arden, Paola Mori, Akim Tamiroff
Have I Seen it Before: Never. That’s embarrassing enough and puts my reputation as the world’s only semi-pro Orson Welles historian, but I did manage to read the novel before getting around to the Criterion Edition DVD. God bless, Criterion, giving a fella something to read packaged with the DVD.
Did I Like It: Sure. What’s not to like?
This feels like a transition film for Welles. Gone are they heady days of playing with the biggest train set imaginable, as Welles once referred to working within the high-budget studio system. He would still go on to make Touch of Evil (1958) a few years after Arkadin, but the days of wine and roses are gone. He’s beginning to embrace the grittier, pseudo-documentary aesthetic that would come to dominate his final films like F For Fake (1973) and The Other side of the Wind (2018). And yet, there are long stretches where it feel like Welles is reaching for and more than often actually attaining the visual polish of the days when he was still a wunderkind.
Now, I understand that this is a prime example of one of Welles’ films that was so severely compromised that it could only be salvaged now by a bit of luck and the hard work of cineastes, but even so there’s something sort of tragic about the sound design of films of the era. Dialogue in motion pictures was barely twenty years old at the time, and the syncing of ADR is never quite right. That technology would still take a number of years, and even today can be a little wobbly without the use of computers.
As he continued to lose the resources of the major studios, he compensates by becoming more experimental. The camera flows through scenes like a swinging pendulum, which would have been unimaginable during his time on Citizen Kane (1941) or The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and really unimaginable for any film at all.
And so I’m left with the same rolling wonder that I’m left with after most of the man’s movies.
What would the movie had been like if he had gotten all of the resources he needed?