From Dave Kehr’s New York Times review:
Is “Mr. Arkadin” a brilliant piece of prepostmodernist “appropriation,” recycling past achievements into a Wellesian meta-movie? Or is it just a mess, reflecting the difficulty Welles was experiencing as he tried to restart his failed American career in Europe?
Isn’t the word for prepostmodernist just modernist?
Fortunately, Kehr qualifies his question to achieve some degree of sensibility, but not before he trivalizes an interesting observation about the much maligned Arkadin. There’s no lack of commentary on the new Criterion release [1] [2], an epic three disc set comprising the two best known versions of the film, as well as a composite meant to represent Welles’ own intentions.
But I think it was made evident in supplementary materials on F for Fake that Welles was deeply tormented by his producers and commercial filmmaking. Always struggling for money to produce his next work, like Cassavetes would in his footsteps, Welles did commercials and voiceovers to finance his independent projects.
It’s more than a little disingenuous that Kehr would create a false dichotomy of Welles’ efforts. In fact, Welles had long been considered a failed director, in spite of his great success. More to the point, what makes his scramble to complete projects like Arkadin so innately modern is that he needed to work in order to complete these patchworked projects and that his artistic process was dictated by market forces. Divorced from the economic constraints, Kehr paints a quainter picture of Welles combining his personal and professional personae that’s equal parts lazy and clever.
Arkadin is fascinating to me for two reasons: first, it’s a film that attempts to flesh out the sinister Harry Lime, a weapons merchant to the Nazis and an international playbo free to globetrot with impunity; secondly, the various edits make it a mystery to fans of Welles’ work, nearly as mysterious as the main character himself. For obsessives, this is a victory by proxy for the loss of a definitive director’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons which was destroyed by the studio with Welles in absentia. Constructed in the same collage-influenced style of F for Fake, Mr. Arkadin is filled with multilinear narratives, amnesia and an unreliable narrator, making him something of Welles’ alter-ego, a fragile personality buried beneath volumes of mystery and deceit.