What did you watch? The confusing crime cat and mouse game, Mr. Arkadin, also knows as Confidential Report, from 1955.

Was this like some sort of live action Tom & Jerry episode? No. That would have made more sense.

Ladies want to know: is there a Mrs. Arkadin? There is not, but there’s a sheltered daughter.

Where to begin with this one? Guy Van Stratten is a small time smuggler and con artist who thinks he can find himself in the good graces of semi-known gangster Gregory Arkadin by wooing the man’s daughter Raina. Well, he’s pretty much immediately confronted by the elder Arkadin, who offers Guy a reward to jet around post-war Europe and Mexico and parts in between to find out information about his past; see, Arkadin suffers from amnesia where he can’t recall who he was or where he was from prior to 1927.

This is called dissociative fugue, where people run from something and create new identities and live whole new lives, not remembering their past life. (I read about this in college and loved the concept. Also, I went to college.) Arkadin was likely a criminal before he lost his memory, and would like to find out why he just woke up one day in a country he clearly wasn’t from with way too much money in his pockets. Arkadin wants this done quietly since he’s clearly a mobster who has some anonymity as no photos of his current state seem to exist.

From there Guy and his girlfriend Mily press various Europeans who would like to be left alone for clues, and the story has some awkward cuts where Guy and Mily are in one spot and then there’s a narration by Guy in an attic elsewhere to a bum trying to stay awake about what happens next and then a cut to Mily hanging out drunk with Arkadin on a boat. Raina and sometimes Arkadin show up as Guy is trying to find more clues, or just behind Guy willing to shell out more money for the same information. We find that Arkadin was involved in sex trafficking, and he stole the money from a woman he was partners with back then.

The last piece of the puzzle confirms that yes, Arkadin stole a lot of money from her, but she’s in a good place and has no concern where Arkadin is nor has any plans to confront him about it. But, in a twist that maybe you saw coming a mile away, Guy finds out that nearly everyone he has talked to about Arkadin has died, and this includes Mily. He finds one more person from the criminal ring, the bum he’s been narrating this story to, and Arkadin kills the bum, with Guy clearly next.

Of course Arkadin makes a big production out of letting Guy he’s next, so Guy has a lot of time to get away. I have no idea why, for practical and not cinematic drama reasons, Arkadin doesn’t kill Guy right then and there, but Guy boards a solidly booked plan back to Europe to go to Raina and let her know that Arkadin is an active killer and not the loving rich father she thinks she knows.

This is such an oddly paced movie, with the disjointed scene and narration setups that made me wonder if I missed a reel. (There are several cuts of the movie, including some that had cut the narration – I watched the “Corinth” version, with the narration. A longer version with more scenes that supposedly help the narrative flow came out in 2006.) Maybe I knew something bad would happen to Mily – we could have used that scene, or something with a confrontation between Arcadin and Mily as she drunkenly blabs about the info they’ve come across, but instead Guy is informed that she was killed along with all the other criminals long past their use for Arcadin.

This movie is an adaptation of a radio show that Orson Welles had appeared in that was a series of prequel stories to his character Harry Lime from the movie The Third Man. (did you follow all that?) That character nor any of the other characters from that movie appear here. Still, kind of weird to imagine some kind of expanded and tangential cinematic universe for his character.

Is it noir? It was unclear to me what kind of legal trouble Guy was/is in with the death of Mily. The character Arkadin reminds me of the Kingpin and his relationship with his wife Vanessa in the silver & bronze age Spider-Man comics. (Actually, I have no idea how long the Kingpin/Vanessa thing goes on, along with The Rose and the Hobgoblin stuff in the 1980’s. I’m a nerd.) Arkadin doesn’t get the satisfaction that his daughter will never know he wasn’t a kind hearted oligarch, but rather a vicious criminal with a far reach covering his tracks.

Written, directed, and starring Orson Welles? It must be good! Other than the disjointed cuts, our hero with no inside voice trying to subtly track down secrets, and some weird ADR, it was pretty good. With Welles, everything is deliberate (but according to wikipedia, the editing was taken out of his hands to get the film finished on schedule). It weakens the suspense of the mystery, but otherwise is pretty engaging.

Anything about the cast? Well we all know who Welles is, right? Raina is played by Paola Mori, who was an Italian countess and was Welles’ 3rd wife, and they were pretty much together until Welles’ last year or so before he died. Wikipedia starts it off with “she spent 8 months in a concentration camp” so, wow. Guy is played by character and stage actor Robert Arden in probably one of his few lead roles in cinema. He was in Joe Macbeth which we covered here in the past.