International Man of Mystery:
Welles' Mr. Arkadin

May 2, 2006

Mr. Arkadin (1955, recently released on DVD by Criterion) is important because it represents the climax of a style that Welles had long been striving toward: the international thriller. The story in this case centers on a young American named Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) who is hired by wealthy financier named Gregory Arkadin (Orson Welles). The job for Guy is to investigate the past of his mysterious employer. How exactly did Arkadin wind up in Zurich, Switzerland with a stash of money from which he made his vast fortune? Arkadin claims to have forgotten everything about his earlier past, but in fact is only using Guy to cover his tracks. The investigation of Arkadin stretches to many sites in Europe.. a castle in Spain, Paris, Amsterdam, and Munich.. and even reaches Tangiers and some coastal city in Mexico. For someone interested in making a film on a tight budget, Orson allowed himself a wide canvas.

Putting aside the Magnificent Ambersons.. often regarded as the most personal of Welles' films.. we can see a peculiar love for globe-trotting characters. The Stranger (1946) is almost entirely rooted in a small town in Connecticut, but has an opening.. simply confusing as it stands.. that contains material expanded in Welles' original film, showing an international search for an escaped Nazi. In The Lady from Shanghai (1948) we get a more fully developed international thriller, featuring Welles as the Irishman Michael O'Hara who gets signed up to work on a long sea voyage.. visiting Mexican coastal sites and winding up in Chinatown in San Francisco. There was also his production of a stage version of Around the World in 80 Days in 1946 and an even earlier attempt to make a film in Brazil.. which for various reasons got him into trouble.

At various points in these blogs I have mentioned the book of interviews with Peter Bogdanovich: This is Orson Welles. One odd aspect of these interviews is their disparate locations. We find chapters labeled: Rome, Guaymas, New York, Van Nuys, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and Paris. Granted, three of those are in Southern California.. but nevertheless the feeling is that Welles rather enjoyed the sense of being an international man.. at home in many countries. And it is important to recognize that a part of the intrigue that settles around Welles is exactly in the sense that he belongs in many parts of the world. Leave it to a director such as John Ford to mythologize a place by returning to a landscape over and over. Orson Welles seems skittish about ever setting a film in the same landscape twice.

One way to further get at this fascination on the part of Welles is to think about his Shakespearian adaptations. These could be considered as a retreat from his international pretensions, but that is to forget the international stature of Shakespeare.. that most universal of English poets. His productions are also not of the kind to Englishize the plays.. whether one thinks about his "Voodoo" Macbeth or his Mediterranean Othello. His treatment of Kafka's The Trial is another example of this yearning to set specifically "World Literature" to film. Again, the only real exception to this proves to be The Magnificent Ambersons, which is largely a return to the setting and myth of his own childhood.

So a further question would be: what do we get out of this self-consciously international aesthetic? I don't mean that as a question to which I have the answer.. but as one about which I will have to think. A timid first answer would be that Welles has grasped film as "world film". This means, of course, that his intended audience is spread out into many different countries.. (which can help an American audience realize why Welles may have been uncaring about matching dialogue with mouth movements at some points in Mr. Arkadin: he is expecting the film to be dubbed or watched by those who don't know English). Working toward "world film" also seems to push Orson Welles toward universal themes (which should not be confused with "popular" themes). In both practicalities and thematic elements Welles is pushing us away from a national cinema and toward something.. well, universally human..