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Mr. Arkadin |
List Price: $7.99
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Reviews |
Features:
Description:
Something of a remake of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles's 1955 Mr. Arkadin is a knowing and self-reflective variation on one of Welles's pet themes: the search for a defining secret of a powerful man. Welles plays an important financier who tries to discover his own past by hiring a man (Robert Arden) to research it. Did the seemingly haunted Arkadin simply forget who he is or where he's been? Or is he seeking his own Rosebud--a crucial, lost thing from his life that can serve (if identified) as a mythic key to former happiness? The film, a European coproduction, was made under the typically difficult and extended conditions Welles had to navigate after leaving Hollywood, and the bumpiness shows. But the entire project is really an act of Wellesian deconstruction--it's Welles making a film about the kind of film Orson Welles previously made--and that approach is more electrifying than one might imagine. The editing in this film, for instance, is not quite like in any of Welles's other works, with bursts of linear action literally disappearing between frames, as if the fabric of reality itself was vanishing. As far as the titan Arkadin is concerned, it might as well be. --Tom Keogh
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