Mr. Arkadin

Babe Ruth didn’t hit every pitch. The Doors released two albums without Jim Morrison. No matter how great a person is at their chosen craft, everyone makes mistakes. Confidential Report (or Mr. Arkadian, if you’re nasty) would be, for my money, Orson Welles’ biggest misstep. Not a bad movie, mind you, but a messy one. A former con man is hired by a millionaire to investigate his own past, as the millionaire claims he has amnesia and can only remember so much of his life. It’s obvious this is a lie, but there’s too much money in it for the con man to do anything but play along. The mystery of who Arkadian is, the names connected to him uttered by a dying man, and the dead bodies Van Stratten keeps encountering is interesting. It’s a very layered and complex web with twists and turns, something Welles normally handles well. Unfortunately, in this case, it’s too complex. To say the movie’s pace is breakneck is under-selling it. It crams so much story into its runtime, and yet, the movie feels short-changed, because it has to move so fast, it has no time to let anything land. Nobody has a character arc, and plot points are hit like a drive-by, because there’s another three to hit in the next scene. And it’s a shame, because the acting is enjoyable, a play on noir but where everybody is morally ambiguous. The direction is classic Welles; overlapping dialogue, unique choices in angles, it’s all so, so good. If this movie has 20 more minutes to let things breathe, it would be top tier Welles. But the way it whips through the overstuffed story hurts the overall package.