CONFIDENTIAL REPORT (or MR. ARKADIN) has (if you look at the background notes) a complex history. It is supposedly based on a novel by Welles, which was actually written by a "ghost" writer, but it was then based on characters and situations from Welles' radio series as Harry Lime (based on the movie by Graham Greene and Sir Carol Reed - THE THIRD MAN), and then it has striking similarities to the basic structure of CITIZEN KANE (a wealthy powerful man is investigated by a reporter). As strip by strip this has been taken apart, older critiques are shown wanting. Peter Cowie's essay on the film in his book THE CINEMA OF ORSON WELLES is a pretty good one, given how poor the film versions were back in the 1970s, but he believed Welles wrote the book.
Let's start from a point Cowie brought up - Arkadin may be based on figures like Sir Basil Zaharoff (the munitions dealer, known as "the Merchant of Death). One he mentions was Alfred Loewenstein, who I mentioned referring to two other films (SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS and GILDA) due to the interesting way he died - he fell out of his private airplane into the English Channel in 1928, and the exact reasons have never been settled satisfactorily - see the book THE MAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY for the best discussion of the mystery). Thus the plane without a pilot is not as odd an opening as presented (although Loewenstein's staff and pilot were still in the plane when it finally landed).
Starting from there the film does look like KANE, except in the exact details. For one thing, Charles Foster Kane died before the reporter is sent to investigate his life - and the scandals that crop up, or failings, or successes are well known to the public. But Kane, for all his failings, is part of the American power circle and social scene. Arkadin is a would-be billionaire too, but he does not make his fortune from mining, real estate, and newspapers, but from dealing with opportunists around the globe (we learn he sold defective military equipment to the Italians in the late 1930s). He has more of a hit-and-run type of approach that Kane (who barely cared for his fortune) never had - at one point he calls up his minions to "Buy Copper", which by the way is not as simplistic an order as one critic suggests (not Cowie) but exactly what someone like Arkadin would say to his minions after discussing the matter with them before.
The original KANE screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz had a sequence in which Kane killed a man over Susan Alexander. This was based on the rumor (still debated, possibly unfairly) that William Randolph Hearst shot Thomas Ince on his yacht. Welles took this out of that script except for a bit about Raymond the butler knowing where all the bodies were buried. This is actually an improvement on that script, as Charles Kane's failings don't really seem to include a desire for corpses.
Kane's tragedy is that he is desperately trying to be everything to everyone and yet remain his own master. His character is one of the most complex in American films (at least up to 1941 - possibly up to 2007). Arkadin's tragedy is a realization he is a creature of the nightmare world - a scorpion - desperate to make his daughter's world better at all cost. But if he is from the gutter, what if his former associates try to blackmail her? What would she think of him by their revelations? Charley Kane lost his normal growing up when his mother did what she mistakenly thought was smart: take him away from his drunken father and give him all the warmth of Thatcher's bank. Gregory Arkadin left the slime of the European swamplands for the grandeur of international finance and castles in Spain, and a British Marquis fiancé for his Raina, always aware that if your base was a swamp you can still fall back into it.
So there are differences in the two figures as well as similarities.
I first saw ARKADIN in 1973 on late night television. The version I saw apparently was the horribly botched cut version of the distributors in the U.S. in the 1950s where sequences flew about without keeping the rhythm of the film or it's sound track in tact (best example: this version has Van Stratton trying to get information out of Oscar (O'Brady - Sophie's husband) while denying him drugs on a boat - but we are shown the latter before we see the boat where this is going on!). I was impressed at sequences with Mischa Auer and Michael Redgrave, and that was about it. Since then more complete versions have turned up on video which make more sense.
It's not in the front rank of Welles' best (KANE, AMBERSOMS, MACBETH, OTHELLO, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, TOUCH OF EVIL - maybe THE TRIAL) but it holds up as well as say LADY FROM SHANGHAI or THE STRANGER. The worst thing is the vagueness of the sound, (a problem of all of Welles' independent productions in Europe). I think it is definitely worth watching, but certainly not in that grotesque 1950s American version.
Let's start from a point Cowie brought up - Arkadin may be based on figures like Sir Basil Zaharoff (the munitions dealer, known as "the Merchant of Death). One he mentions was Alfred Loewenstein, who I mentioned referring to two other films (SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS and GILDA) due to the interesting way he died - he fell out of his private airplane into the English Channel in 1928, and the exact reasons have never been settled satisfactorily - see the book THE MAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY for the best discussion of the mystery). Thus the plane without a pilot is not as odd an opening as presented (although Loewenstein's staff and pilot were still in the plane when it finally landed).
Starting from there the film does look like KANE, except in the exact details. For one thing, Charles Foster Kane died before the reporter is sent to investigate his life - and the scandals that crop up, or failings, or successes are well known to the public. But Kane, for all his failings, is part of the American power circle and social scene. Arkadin is a would-be billionaire too, but he does not make his fortune from mining, real estate, and newspapers, but from dealing with opportunists around the globe (we learn he sold defective military equipment to the Italians in the late 1930s). He has more of a hit-and-run type of approach that Kane (who barely cared for his fortune) never had - at one point he calls up his minions to "Buy Copper", which by the way is not as simplistic an order as one critic suggests (not Cowie) but exactly what someone like Arkadin would say to his minions after discussing the matter with them before.
The original KANE screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz had a sequence in which Kane killed a man over Susan Alexander. This was based on the rumor (still debated, possibly unfairly) that William Randolph Hearst shot Thomas Ince on his yacht. Welles took this out of that script except for a bit about Raymond the butler knowing where all the bodies were buried. This is actually an improvement on that script, as Charles Kane's failings don't really seem to include a desire for corpses.
Kane's tragedy is that he is desperately trying to be everything to everyone and yet remain his own master. His character is one of the most complex in American films (at least up to 1941 - possibly up to 2007). Arkadin's tragedy is a realization he is a creature of the nightmare world - a scorpion - desperate to make his daughter's world better at all cost. But if he is from the gutter, what if his former associates try to blackmail her? What would she think of him by their revelations? Charley Kane lost his normal growing up when his mother did what she mistakenly thought was smart: take him away from his drunken father and give him all the warmth of Thatcher's bank. Gregory Arkadin left the slime of the European swamplands for the grandeur of international finance and castles in Spain, and a British Marquis fiancé for his Raina, always aware that if your base was a swamp you can still fall back into it.
So there are differences in the two figures as well as similarities.
I first saw ARKADIN in 1973 on late night television. The version I saw apparently was the horribly botched cut version of the distributors in the U.S. in the 1950s where sequences flew about without keeping the rhythm of the film or it's sound track in tact (best example: this version has Van Stratton trying to get information out of Oscar (O'Brady - Sophie's husband) while denying him drugs on a boat - but we are shown the latter before we see the boat where this is going on!). I was impressed at sequences with Mischa Auer and Michael Redgrave, and that was about it. Since then more complete versions have turned up on video which make more sense.
It's not in the front rank of Welles' best (KANE, AMBERSOMS, MACBETH, OTHELLO, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, TOUCH OF EVIL - maybe THE TRIAL) but it holds up as well as say LADY FROM SHANGHAI or THE STRANGER. The worst thing is the vagueness of the sound, (a problem of all of Welles' independent productions in Europe). I think it is definitely worth watching, but certainly not in that grotesque 1950s American version.