Orson Welles’s “Mr. Arkadin” tells the story of an elusive billionaire who hires an American smuggler to investigate his past. Welles missed the editing deadline, so the producer handed over the editing to others. Following two Spanish-dubbed versions, released in Madrid in March 1955, the first English-language version was released in London in August 1955 as “Confidential Report” but was never released in the US. The fourth version, called “the Corinth version”, was discovered in 1961 and was released in the US in 1962. Finally, in 2006, “the Criterion edit” was released; likely to remain the one closest to Welles’ intentions.
You May Also Like
A sudden change forces Karin to re-evaluate her life. With the help of friends, food and passion she refuses to accept that life has an expiration date and takes the second chance she is given.
An escaped convict and a woman ponder what to do with a not-quite-dead body.
On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the 18th century, an artist is commissioned to paint a young woman’s wedding portrait.
Derrick De Marney finds himself in a 39 Steps situation when he is wrongly accused of murder. While a fugitive from the law, De Marney is helped by heroine Nova Pilbeam, who three years earlier had played the adolescent kidnap victim in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. The obligatory “fish out of water” scene, in which the principals are briefly slowed down by a banal everyday event, occurs during a child’s birthday party. The actual villain, whose identity is never in doubt (Hitchcock made thrillers, not mysteries) is played by George Curzon, who suffers from a twitching eye. Curzon’s revelation during an elaborate nightclub sequence is a Hitchcockian tour de force, the sort of virtuoso sequence taken for granted in these days of flexible cameras and computer enhancement, but which in 1937 took a great deal of time, patience and talent to pull off. Released in the US as The Girl Was Young, Young and Innocent was based on a novel by Josephine Tey.
Young and talented Han van Meegeren is a rebel in the early 1920’s Amsterdam art-scene. Because he paints in the style of his idols Rembrandt and Vermeer, critics find his work old-fashioned and they call him a copycat. Just to prove a point, he produces a fake Vermeer and tries to pass it off as a real one. It works. Instead of revealing the truth and thereby embarrassing the art world, he continues to make money off of his many forgeries. Soon he is caught in a web of lies and deceit, and his life spins out of control. Then one day, high ranking Nazi Hermann Göring knocks on his door, looking for a Vermeer for his private collection…
Julius and Vincent Benedict are the results of an experiment that would allow for the perfect child. Julius was planned and grows to athletic proportions. Vincent is an accident and is somewhat smaller in stature. Vincent is placed in an orphanage while Julius is taken to a south seas island and raised by philosophers. Vincent becomes the ultimate low life and is about to be killed by loan sharks.
A dynamic young entrepreneur finds herself locked in a hotel room with the corpse of her dead lover. She hires a prestigious lawyer to defend her and they work together to figure out what actually happened.
Kitano plays Murakawa, a Tokyo yakuza tiring of gangster life. Along with a few of his henchmen, he is sent by his boss to Okinawa to help end a gang war, supposedly to mediate between two warring clans. He finds that the dispute between the clans is insignificant and whilst wondering why he was sent to Okinawa at all, Murakawa’s headquarters are bombed and he and his gang are ambushed in a bar.
A native-American lacrosse team makes its way through a prep school league tournament.
Following the murder of her father by hired hand Tom Chaney, 14-year-old farm girl Mattie Ross sets out to capture the killer. To aid her, she hires the toughest U.S. Marshal she can find, a man with “true grit,” Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn. Mattie insists on accompanying Cogburn, whose drinking, sloth, and generally reprobate character do not augment her faith in him. Against his wishes, she joins him in his trek into the Indian Nations in search of Chaney. They are joined by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who wants Chaney for his own purposes. The unlikely trio find danger and adventure on the journey, and each has his or her “grit” tested.