In this curious film, the ridiculous clashes with the sublime. Robert Arden and Patricia Medina turn in two of the worst, cheesiest performances imaginable. They're both straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. He's all lock-jawed and hard-boiled; she vacillates between wide-eyed fawning and witch-like threats. The tedium they engender is very difficult to get past, because you can't even watch them as campy.
That's partly because their performances are just that bad, and partly because there is so much else in this movie that works well, or at least strives for excellence. There are a variety of striking images placed before us. Welles' eye for distinctive camera angles and atmospheric lighting was working overtime in this picture. You might quibble with some of his choices as being a tad too melodramatic, but you can't fault him for careful attention to detail. His performance is the usual Welles stuff--overpowering, and perhaps at times almost cartoonish like that of Arden and Medina. But make no mistake: when Welles was cartoonish, it was because he meant to be. Not because that was the only way he knew how to "act." Paolo Mori was also wonderful as as Arkadin's daughter. There were other great characters along the way. Their performances also clash noisily with the wooden hamming from Arden.
And, as others have mentioned, the sound is problematic. Clearly, the movie was overdubbed, and badly, after the fact. In fact, when I first started watching it, I was convinced that it was originally filmed in a foreign language. Nope--something went wrong during filming, it appears, or Welles for reasons of his own decided to re-do all of the sound in the studio after filming. The result is pretty bad. Whether a scene is in a small room, a piazza, an open field, or a vaulted cathedral, the result is the same. Background noise sounds just like that: artificial background noise. The voices sound like they were recorded in a very small, very dead studio. Amateurish and clumsy.
The result is a movie that is, at times, interesting to watch, but it's hard to forget its weaknesses, even for a moment.
One wonders how many times the stagehands had to wrangle a raging Welles off of Arden, prying his hands from the actor's neck, convincing him that murder is illegal, even for a cinematic giant, feeding him rum punch and peanuts, and telling Arden to go hide for fifteen minutes until the anger has passed.
That's partly because their performances are just that bad, and partly because there is so much else in this movie that works well, or at least strives for excellence. There are a variety of striking images placed before us. Welles' eye for distinctive camera angles and atmospheric lighting was working overtime in this picture. You might quibble with some of his choices as being a tad too melodramatic, but you can't fault him for careful attention to detail. His performance is the usual Welles stuff--overpowering, and perhaps at times almost cartoonish like that of Arden and Medina. But make no mistake: when Welles was cartoonish, it was because he meant to be. Not because that was the only way he knew how to "act." Paolo Mori was also wonderful as as Arkadin's daughter. There were other great characters along the way. Their performances also clash noisily with the wooden hamming from Arden.
And, as others have mentioned, the sound is problematic. Clearly, the movie was overdubbed, and badly, after the fact. In fact, when I first started watching it, I was convinced that it was originally filmed in a foreign language. Nope--something went wrong during filming, it appears, or Welles for reasons of his own decided to re-do all of the sound in the studio after filming. The result is pretty bad. Whether a scene is in a small room, a piazza, an open field, or a vaulted cathedral, the result is the same. Background noise sounds just like that: artificial background noise. The voices sound like they were recorded in a very small, very dead studio. Amateurish and clumsy.
The result is a movie that is, at times, interesting to watch, but it's hard to forget its weaknesses, even for a moment.
One wonders how many times the stagehands had to wrangle a raging Welles off of Arden, prying his hands from the actor's neck, convincing him that murder is illegal, even for a cinematic giant, feeding him rum punch and peanuts, and telling Arden to go hide for fifteen minutes until the anger has passed.