Mr. Arkadin: A Version History

It’s worth adding that things rarely remain fixed and permanent in the realm of Welles scholarship. The complicated personal dynamics between Welles and producer Louis Dolivet, friends since the forties, and the traumatic rupture in their relationship over this film, contributes a further mitigating factor to the mystery, which has started to become clearer with François Thomas’ recent discovery of their correspondence. This has reportedly made it easier to establish an overall chronology of what Welles edited and when and of the numerous adjustments and concessions that were made on both sides, offering a much more complex picture of their tormented friendship than we’ve had up until now, with fewer certainties about where to place the blame. Like most of our understanding of Welles and his work, this discovery is still very much in progress.

I encountered similar complexities as a consultant on the reedit of Touch of Evil that was undertaken in 1998. A new version was created based on a lengthy memo sent by Welles, in 1957, to the studio chief at Universal, containing suggestions that had mainly never been followed. But Welles stressed at the time that he was trying to improve Universal’s version of the film rather than his own, and it was never our intention to produce a definitive version. Unfortunately, film merchandisers tend to think that every film has a “correct” version and an “incorrect” version, a release cut and a “director’s cut,” so our version still often gets erroneously labeled as the latter, when the very notion of a director’s cut of Touch of Evil is inconceivable. The same caveat applies to Mr. Arkadin, in spades. Properly speaking, Welles’s own version never existed, even in his own mind, since that mind never saw his own work in fixed and static terms. It’s still in perpetual development, just like our appreciation of his mercurial imagination.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is the author of Discovering Orson Welles, a collection of essays to be published by the University of California Press in late 2006.

After comparing the five English- and Spanish-language versions of Mr. Arkadin shot by shot and sound by sound, and delving into the archives of the production company, I must acknowledge that the status of most versions of this film remains to be established. The more we learn about Mr. Arkadin, that is, the more new questions arise. Still, I certainly consider the cut that Warner Bros. distributed worldwide in 1956—called Confidential Report—to be the available version that should be seen before any other.

In the field of alternative edits, generally speaking, I don’t think that the longer version is necessarily the best one, nor that the most important issue is the number of additional scenes a version offers. As for the order of the scenes, in this instance we do not know what Welles would have decided, since he changed his mind about it many times over the months. To me, what matters most is, first, the extent of Welles’s involvement and then the flow, the inner rhythm of the picture and sound editing. Despite its flaws, Confidential Report qualifies as the most Welles-like version in that area.

True, it was recut by producer Louis Dolivet after Welles left Europe, in the autumn of 1955, to resume his American career. And its major drawback is quite apparent: we lose the intricate flashback structure that Welles had decided upon just prior to the shoot. Yet what is more important, the overall structure or the editing of individual sequences? In this case, I think the latter. From such clues as the fact that the Dolivet version contains many lines that Welles rewrote and redubbed after the time of the early, temporary cut known as the Corinth version we can conclude that Confidential Report represents a more refined stage of Welles’s editing, dubbing, and scoring in certain places. This is most plainly true of the scene of Bracco’s death, the beginning of the masked ball episode, and the sequence where Arkadin commissions the investigation of his past from Van Stratten. Why, then, would we want to go back to earlier steps of Welles’s work? Dolivet actually did very little reediting of scenes, beyond tailoring their very beginning or very end to the new structure every now and then. He also had Robert Arden, who plays Van Stratten, record some new offscreen narration. Apart from that, however, Dolivet did not insist on a new mix and let the film be released with only a kind of premix, more or less as it was when Welles’s editor, Renzo Lucidi, completed his work, in April 1955. So, what we hear in Confidential Report is closest to what Welles attempted in the field of sound.

Above all, the greater coherence and energy of Confidential Report owe much to the way Welles handled the music. He had asked Paul Misraki to write his score without reading the script, seeing the film, or being given cue sheets and timings. The composer’s only guidelines were Welles’s requirements in terms of atmosphere and style. Welles then freely fiddled with the recorded score. He constantly glued together fragments from different tracks in order to create composite cues that would be perfectly timed to the scenes. Only Confidential Report does full justice to that piecemeal work. In several scenes of the Corinth cut, we merely have a haphazard first attempt at music editing. And Welles had no hand in the commonplace scoring to be found in the Spanish release version required by the coproduction.

The Corinth allows us a glimpse of Welles’s multiple-flashback structure, but it is a cruder edit. Its occasional awkwardness appears nowhere more clearly than in the scene of Bracco’s death. There, some shots have been switched from one place to another, but the sound editing implied by those changes has not yet been carried over. So, music or sound effects, or both, vanish into thin air from one shot to the next. As for the Spanish release version, it enables us to discover a number of shots, some of them marvelous, but everything suggests that Welles cut them from the English-­language version.

Anyway, the most urgent matter now is to succeed in locating a print of the version premiered in London, in August 1955, a few months before Warner Bros. and Dolivet agreed on reediting the film. Also called Confidential Report (a title that Welles himself suggested, probably to counter the new titles Warners put forward), that version was referred to by the director as a mere “selling copy,” which he had grudgingly authorized to be shown. Though it would still lack Welles’s fine-tuning, we can only hope it would offer us a truer view of his editing before the flashback structure was dismantled.

François Thomas is Professor of Film Studies at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III. He has written numerous articles about Welles, particularly on alternative versions. With Jean-Pierre Berthomé, he coauthored the book Citizen Kane as well as the forthcoming Orson Welles at Work.

“All of the eloquence of film is created in the editing room,” said Orson Welles in a 1958 interview about his working methods. “In the editing room, I work very slowly, which always enrages the producers, who tear the film from my hands. I don’t know why it takes me so long. I could work for an eternity editing a film.” About Mr. Arkadin he was always very clear: “That film was taken away from me completely, and was totally destroyed in the cutting. That was the real disaster of my life.”

Mr. Arkadin survives in numerous versions, none of which contain all the details or the desired elements hinted at by Welles in various interviews. In the Spanish release (or “Mark Sharpe”) version, for instance, we discover the shot with the corpse of Mily on the beach in the very beginning, as Welles told Peter Bogdanovich he had intended. In the Corinth version, we find the “pretty intricate” flashback structure he talks about in the same interview. In the work print material preserved at the Luxembourg cinematheque, we discover a clue to Welles’s intention regarding a sequence of scenes in Mexico: a dissolve from a close-up of Van Stratten to the Mexican police surfaced, which indicates that in Mexico Van Stratten was meant to meet Sophie after talking with Arkadin (these scenes are clearly misordered in all the known versions). And in the Spanish release version, there are many more establishing shots for each location, which gives us a better feeling for the globe-hopping nature of the story. Still, the differences among the versions are confined to certain elements of the film: the transitions between the episodes, the flashback structure, the order of some scenes, the dubbed dialogue in places. Eighty to ninety percent of the film is the same in each version.