‘Mr. Arkadin’: The movie Orson Welles called “the real disaster of my life”
Only a fool would argue that Orson Welles‘ career was not a complete and utter success. However, even the greatest figures of the film industry can occasionally look back on their works and experience moments of regret, and Welles was no different in that light, despite his remarkable reputation as a master of the narrative arts.
It wasn’t just cinema that Welles was an auteur of, after all, for he was just as prolific and admired in the realms of radio and theatre. In fact, Welles hadn’t even been keen on getting involved in cinema until he was finally convinced to take on his feature directorial debut, Citizen Kane, which just so happened to become one of the greatest movies of all time.
Some of Welles’ other most acclaimed works included a 1936 production of Macbeth with an African-American cast, a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, and a series of other movies such as The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil and The Trial.
Halfway through the 1950s, though, Welles suffered a rare career misstep, and by his own admission, his effort in 1955 was a genuine disaster. Mr. Arkadin, known as Confidential Report in Britain, saw Welles play the titular character, a wealthy man who claims to know nothing of his past and hires an ex-con, played by Robert Ardern, to investigate the events of his personal history.
On the surface, the film sounds like it could have been yet another masterstroke from Welles, but the truth was that the director himself felt terrible about how it went down. “That’s a real flawed one, yes,” he had once said in a 1958 interview with Cahiers. “Oh, yes, that’s a disaster.”
Describing the narrative of Mr. Arkadin, Welles explained, “It’s a story about curious forms of vanity because here’s a man who commits these terrible murders because of his interest in his image. In other words, nothing will happen to him. If any of the things, which are found out about him, are printed, nothing will happen to Arkadin. It’s really about vanity and about people’s preoccupation with their image.”
According to Welles, though, the film was “completely taken away” from him and was “totally destroyed” in the cutting process. In fact, there have been several different versions of the movie. According to a 1991 essay by film historian Jonathan Rosenbaum, there were seven different versions of the film, but since then, another two versions have been released.
For instance, there was the main Spanish-language version of Mr. Arkadin, a longer Spanish cut, the Confidential Report European print, the US release version, and a 2006 Criterion edit, just to name a few, each of which has different narratives. Discussing his impression of the film overall, Welles noted, “That is the real disaster of my life, that one. There’s your flawed masterpiece. It’s Mr. Arkadin. I hate to think about it.”
Interestingly, Welles had thought that a properly cut version of Mr. Arkadin could have been “very popular”, a movie that “everyone would have liked. However, what resulted was a film that even Welles ended up being “afraid” of seeing. “It’s terrible what they did to me on that,” the legendary director said. “The film was snatched from my hands more brutally than one has ever snatched a film from anyone… it’s as if they’d kidnapped my child!”
