"Mr. Arkadin" and "Citizen Kane" were both, in simplest terms, about the search to uncover the past of a tycoon
The film is regarded merely as a highly-colored, larger-than-life, more-exciting-than-life piece of entertaining suspense
The story is basically about Arkadin hiring a young American to uncover forgotten events in his early life Only later did the American realize that, as he tracked down the people who knew the secrets of Arkadin's hidden past, the financier was having them murdered one by one, and intended at the end to have his own investigator murdered too so that the trail he had uncovered would be destroyed for ever
But all this was simply a thread on which to hang the ornate jewels of those characters Mischa Auer, the tall, cadaverous, impoverished Russian owner of a Copenhagen flea circus, sitting alone in a tiny room with the repulsive insects which are the only creatures for which he cares, feeding them on his own thin arm, looking attentively with huge distorted eye through a large magnifying glass at the probing investigator
Akim Tamiroff, starving in Munich as a neglected-looking beggar willing to trade his secrets for a meal
Katina Paxinou, the ruthless woman who had run a criminal gang in Europe and now lived on her fortune in Mexico And Michael Redgrave, an unsuccessful dealer, scrabbling about his shop filled with antique junk
Such characters project the suspense of which entertainment is made
The story is basically about Arkadin hiring a young American to uncover forgotten events in his early life Only later did the American realize that, as he tracked down the people who knew the secrets of Arkadin's hidden past, the financier was having them murdered one by one, and intended at the end to have his own investigator murdered too so that the trail he had uncovered would be destroyed for ever
But all this was simply a thread on which to hang the ornate jewels of those characters Mischa Auer, the tall, cadaverous, impoverished Russian owner of a Copenhagen flea circus, sitting alone in a tiny room with the repulsive insects which are the only creatures for which he cares, feeding them on his own thin arm, looking attentively with huge distorted eye through a large magnifying glass at the probing investigator
Akim Tamiroff, starving in Munich as a neglected-looking beggar willing to trade his secrets for a meal
Katina Paxinou, the ruthless woman who had run a criminal gang in Europe and now lived on her fortune in Mexico And Michael Redgrave, an unsuccessful dealer, scrabbling about his shop filled with antique junk
Such characters project the suspense of which entertainment is made