The Magic World of Orson Welles (37 page)

Figures 7.2–7.5: Minor characters' faces loom like apparitions in
Mr. Arkadin
.

Of course the “primal scene” turns out to be rather banal, the movie generating its most impressive effects at the level of imagery rather than content. As with most of his other films, Welles uses Freudian expressionism in a teasing, half-conscious way, constructing the story as a devious, defensive puzzle, a conjuring trick that plays upon certain anxieties without naming them directly. The characters are so broadly drawn that they suggest various symbolic possibilities: Arkadin and Van Stratten resemble the antagonists in a “family drama,” and because one is American while the other is Slavic, they also vaguely connote figures in a Cold War allegory. In the most general sense, they are like the scorpion and the frog in the little fable Arkadin tells his party guests. One day, the story goes, a scorpion persuaded a frog to carry him across a river; midway across, the scorpion stung the frog and drowned himself. When the dying frog complained that “there is no logic in this,” the scorpion replied, “I know . . . it's my character.” The moral, as in Welles's other films, seems to be that life is determined by irrational principles. In this case the frog manages to survive, but toward the end his antagonist tells him, “You didn't know what you were asking for.”

Like any assault on the surface logic and reasonableness of things,
Mr. Arkadin
generates a nervous humor. It resembles
The Lady from Shanghai
in being narrated by a frog-witted, sometimes dumbfounded protagonist whose reactions heighten the zany unreality of events. Nearly always there is a tension between Van Stratten's clipped, world-weary commentary—which falls squarely in the tradition of the private-eye story—and the surreal quality of the imagery. For example, when Van Stratten remarks that Arkadin spied on him and Raina, we see the couple cycling through a forest in Spain; Welles then cuts to the shot reproduced in
figure 7.6
, showing one of the tycoon's well-dressed minions peeping out from behind a slender birch tree. Much of the film is played in this farcical style, as if the world were making Van Stratten the victim of a practical joke. He bumps into a stuffed armadillo in Trebitsch's junk shop, where the proprietor keeps trying to sell him a rusted “teleoscope”; he is peeped at through a magnifying glass by a flea-training “Professor,” who tells him (in the voice of Orson Welles), “after twenty-thousand years murder is a business that is still in the hands of amateurs”; he is quizzed by a silly German policeman (Gert Frobe), who shouts in broken English, “It's very interesting to learn how you that knew!” In the midst of his desperate attempt to escape Arkadin, he is blackmailed by Zouk, who insists on being given a hot goose liver for Christmas dinner; at that very moment, a cuckoo clock chimes on the wall behind Van Stratten's head.

Figure 7.6: One of Arkadin's minions spying on Van Stratten and Raina.

Some of the richest, most farcical humor is reserved for the darkest, most pathetic scenes, especially the ones involving Van Stratten's attempts to hide Jacob Zouk from Arkadin. Zouk is a ravaged figure intended to remind us of the persecution of the Jews, but he is also something of a Beckett tramp and a good example of what Shakespeare would call “unaccommodated man.” Despite his age and illness, there is a human comedy in his wish to be left alone, his intransigent, donkey-like refusal to heed warnings of danger. When he is literally dragged from his bed, he grabs his blanket and starts a tug of war. After he and Van Stratten have inched halfway across the room, Zouk shouts, “But this ain't the way out, Mister!” Van Stratten then whirls around in the other direction and hauls away at the blanket while Zouk scoops up his clothes with a free arm. Outside, Van Stratten suddenly realizes that Arkadin is about to appear, so he opens one of the apartment house doors and shoves the pantless old man into the presence of a lady in curlers. The lady (played by Tamara Shane, Tamiroff's wife) takes some money and agrees to hide Zouk under the covers of her bed. Meanwhile, a band outside in the street begins playing “Silent Night”:

ZOUK
: I ain't heard that piece in fourteen years.

LADY
: Get into bed!

ZOUK
: That's something else I ain't heard in fourteen years.

Later, Van Stratten rents a hotel room as a hiding place, and Zouk turns into a sadistic tease: “If I dunt get dat goose liver I'm going
ho-ome
,” he sings. Sitting primly on a chair at the far end of the room, he chuckles, “I'll give you an hour,” his laughter turning into a diseased cough. As a clown he is all the more effective because he is in such pain, and he causes Arkadin to laugh hollowly. “What are you laughing at?” Zouk asks. “Old age,” Arkadin says.

In the scenes with Tamiroff,
Mr. Arkadin
has a more truly Shakespearian feeling than
Othello
, generating a bigger-than-life energy and moving effortlessly between broad comedy and images of death. But these scenes are relatively quiet compared to the rest of the movie, which seems bent on creating a restless confusion. The interviews with Arkadin's former associates are interspersed with montages showing Van Stratten talking with people in streets all over the West; Paul Misraki's Slavonic dance music plays on the soundtrack, and each shot ends with a rapid pan to the right, the camera stopping in a new country. The world spins out of control, and when the film pauses to allow exchanges of dialogue, we are kept in a state of vertigo. In one scene aboard Gregory Arkadin's yacht, where we are given important information about his politics and his past, the entire set rocks wildly to simulate a storm at sea. The camera rolls at different angles from the cabin, and the two players, who are dressed gaudily for a shipboard party, literally stumble from one corner to another.

This frenzy is reflected also in the editing.
Mr. Arkadin
is the most fragmented of Welles's movies, every scene split into multiple facets, with a variety of camera setups for even the most static dialogue. And if Welles gives us little time to orient ourselves geographically, he uses the editing to confuse us in regard to local space. A typically baffling moment occurs in Mexico, where Van Stratten has tracked down the mysterious Sophie, who knew Arkadin in Poland. We see Van Stratten walking across a sunlit, white-columned parapet above the sea; suddenly, inexplicably, a telephone rings and Van Stratten steps behind a column to answer it. Arkadin's voice comes from the other end of the line, and we assume that the call is long distance. But Arkadin is playing a joke and has come to Mexico himself. When Van Stratten hangs up the phone, he walks to the edge of the parapet and sees his employer down below, seated in a portico and surrounded by an entourage of servants and bathing beauties. We cut back and forth between the two men as they speak
to each other, and then, as Van Stratten leaves the parapet, we shift to a wide-angle, over-the-shoulder view photographed from behind the tycoon; Van Stratten can be seen approaching down a huge stairway, from a distance so vast that the two men could hardly have held the conversation we have just seen.

Welles repeatedly uses lens distortions, radical camera angles, and shifting perspectives to give the film a jagged, out-of-kilter appearance. In one of the early scenes between Arkadin and Van Stratten, the two men are shown concluding their business arrangement as they drink brandy in Arkadin's curiously spartan office. Welles makes the spatial relationship between the two actors slightly confusing by shooting their heads from several angles and by cutting from one extreme viewpoint to another; for example, he shows Van Stratten as a small, distant figure in a wide-angle shot from over Arkadin's shoulder, then cuts to a tilted, middle-distance close-up of Arkadin. Sometimes the eyelines of the players—the directions of their glances in respective close-ups—do not match; in one exchange Van Stratten looks almost directly at the camera while Arkadin stares a bit off to the left.

The soundtrack is also disorienting, often creating a split between words and actions. Undoubtedly because of revisions and the chaotic, make-do circumstance of the production, Welles has created an unusual blend of offscreen narration and dramatic speech, using Van Stratten's voice to summarize events during scenes that appear to have been shot and edited for dialogue.

The technique resembles the sort of speeded-up, economical exposition one frequently encounters in novels, where scraps of dialogue are blended with an authorial voice. But the effect is more complicated because we are given a “present tense” of actions and sounds at the same time we are being told about them in the past—a simultaneity and multiplicity of detail that is possible only in the movies. (In some cases the visual track has been blended with at least three separate levels of sound, in a difficult and meticulous process of recording.) Now and then Van Stratten's narration is redundant of the visual presentation, as happens frequently in a film like Billy Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard
, but more often the commentary is modified by what we see. The narrative is both extremely dense with information and extremely rapid, the action usually standing in ironic relation to the voice-over. The audience must therefore strain to catch the auditory implications, even while they struggle to orient themselves in space.

Welles's bewildering, shattered style owes something to the conditions under which the film was made, but it is also appropriate to one of his underlying
themes: the decay and metamorphosis of Europe after the war.
Mr. Arkadin
fits rather nicely Rafaël Pividal's description of modernist works by Artaud and Beckett; these two, Pividal says, are witnesses to “a world that has fallen apart, to a mankind that is homeless and terrorized by a faceless master.” The delirium in these works, Pividal writes, “cannot be reduced to the simple Oedipal triangle,” chiefly because it has more to do with the state than with the family. In the same way,
Mr. Arkadin
's disequilibrium and its sexually obsessive imagery are combined with references to a more specifically historical madness—for example, in the poster advertising Mily as a “striptease atomique”—and if Gregory Arkadin is partly a Freudian bogeyman and partly a lonely child, he is also a political figure, whose fall brings down a government.

The political theme is treated so lightly that at first glance it is difficult to see. At one point Van Stratten reads aloud a written report he has received from one of Arkadin's rival financiers: “In another epoch this man might have sacked Rome or been hanged as a pirate,” the report says. “Today we must accept him for what he is—a phemomenom [
sic
] of crisis and dissolution.” This is as close as the film comes to passing explicit judgment on Arkadin, who is never believable as a historical type anyway; he has as much in common with oriental despots as with modern capitalists and can be regarded as a symptom of the times only in the most abstract, symbolic sense. Nevertheless, there was some factual basis for the character. In 1951 Welles had toured Italy and occupied Germany, recording his impressions for the British journal
The Fortnightly
; among the people he met was a tycoon he describes with cinematic relish: