RvB's After Images: Zouk's Lair in Mr. Arkadin

Over the decades, Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin lay around in bits and pieces, like the statue of Ozymandias or something. And then last year Criterion presented a selection of three versions, to try to approximate the film Welles had in mind, before the director was kicked out of the editing room by his producer Louis Dolivet. The film, retitled Confidential Report ("it sounds like the title of a bad spy novel." Welles complained) was released in the early 1950s. It had its partisans, even if it was nothing like what Welles had envisioned. Part of the blame for the mangling is on Welles' temperamental qualities. When Welles was at his worst, the movie's star Robert Arden characterized him as "a goddamn maniac."

In its long version, this newer Arkadin is a compromise between three competing lengths of recut film, Mr. Arkadin ranges from passages of inept charm to sequences--such as a highly macabre Goya theme party--that was as good as anything he ever did. And yet Mr. Arkadin never seems like out of control filmmaking, let alone proof that Welles 'never really worked again after Citizen Kane,' that ghost story used to keep young filmmakers complacent and terrified of their producers. An extra on the Criterion DVD The Complete Mr. Arkadin is scenes of Welles directing his stars Paola Mori and Robert Arden, and in these snippets we hear the off-screen voice of a director who knew exactly what he wanted, even if he had to be a little peremptory to get it.
As the Satanic plutocrat from Russia's Georgia, the unsavory Arkadin the millionaire (Welles) has most of the powers we associate with a pagan God: the vast beard, omniscience, the rumbling voice, the ability to fly (in a private plane, yes, but still), and the ability to strike men dead. All this, even before Claude Chabrol got Welles up to even more Olympian shenanigans in Ten Days Wonder. Arkadin does something that was unusual then, but quite common now. He hires a detective to vet himself, to make sure there's nothing illegal out there that will interfere with him getting a defense contract for the US Army. The amateur detective tapped for the job is Robert Arden's Guy, a shady, small time smuggler. Part of his reason for taking Arkadin's bait is Guy's fondness for the millionaire's sultry daughter Raina (played by Paola Mori, later to be the third Mrs. Welles). It's fairly obviously bait, since, as always, Welles plays a man who shouldn't be trusted farther than he could be thrown.

What I wanted to talk about was the flashbacks, which are essential to the long, composite version. They all take place in a falling-apart flat somewhere in the low-rent part of Germany. Our double-crossed hero Guy tells the story of how he was set up to a derelict called Zouk (Akim Tamiroff)--and Zouk is the dying, half-sane last link to Arkadin's forbidden past. Zouk seems to live in a cubist painting. He's decorated his walls with bicycle wheels, old newspapers and broken bird-cages. He stalls out the hero's tale, muttering in disbelief and pleading to be let alone to die. Many times over the years I've enjoyed Tamiroff, whose voice is the model for cartoon villain Boris Badenov--a Russian actor who Hollywood used as a utility player whenever they needed someone who was crooked and Slavic (or Arabic, or Hungarian, or Tartar...). Tamiroff worked for everyone from Stanislavsky to Mamoulian to Preston Sturges to Godard, and I've never see a single interview written with him.

Zouk is crazy, but there's crazy flamboyant acting throughout Mr. Arkadin, At heart, Mr. Arkadin is a gathering of poignant weirdos. Mischa Auer has a bit as the proprietor of a flea circus: voila, Auer, a frequently tedious dialect comic actor, is suddenly real, and sad, and pitiful, and frightening (he's a washed up criminal working a flea circus, and he feeds his trained fleas with his own blood). One suspect is Michael Redgrave, the owner of an Amsterdam junk shop. He's like a gay, hairnet-wearing Fagin from Oliver Twist, rejoicing in the Tolkinesque name "Bergomil Trebitsch". The junk shop man handles detective Guy like a diva turning aside the questions of a persistent reporter:

Guy: "Where is she?"
Trebitsch: "Ehhh, where is anybody?"

Lately, the idea of "over the top" worries me. And when we see what "the top" is supposed to consist of, I'm not sure I care about the top anymore. Here's an example: Jim Carrey's The Riddler in the third Batman movie, announcing his scheme to suck up all the intelligence in Gotham City (such as the intelligence was in that movie); He explains his scheme will make him "a Goddddd..(Dolbyized rumble here). For a brief instant, you could almost take the film seriously, because the infamous Schumacher and company had committed to the effort to startle the and weird-out the audience. And then "the rubber-faced fartsmith" as The Onion always describes Carrey, apologizes for even trying: "Was that too over the top?" he asks Batman. If Carrey, who is supposed to be Mr. Comic Anarchy, worries about "the top", should the rest of us care about it anymore?

Cinema can reverse time's arrow, and present microscopic studies of humanity, so when you're watching, as Pauline Kael said, you can feel: "I know that man, I recognize that man...My God, I am that man." Because film is capable of such intimacy, sometimes the uncanny power of the theatrical effect doesn't get the respect it deserves. That's why so much flamboyant work is moaned about as "over the top". Consider, then, Welles, David Lynch, the Coens, Von Stroheim, Guy Maddin, even Jean Vigo, all directors who fairly uninterested in the top. And what interests me almost anything more than anything that movies can offer is Zouk's lair: the dusty, strange actors, warehoused props, stock footage and library music, cigarette holders, fishy accents, derbies and fezzes, putty noses, taxidermed owls, wooden legs and false beards. CGI creates the monsters, as in Pirates of the Caribbean, but it's over-the-top ideas like a monster's heart beating in an iron treasure chest that really make up a film.