Confidential Report [VHS]

This is an excellent film and an excellent Dvd. You get three versions of the film on three discs, and some really good extras.

It comes in a fat digipak fold-out style case that fits into an outer slipcase. It's accopanied by a book about the film that also fits into the slipcase.

The extras are impressive. You get;
All three versions of the film: Corinth version, Confidential Report, and the new comprehensive version, are newly restored.
There is a commentary.
An interview with Welles biographer.
Three half-hour episodes of THE LIVES OF HARRY LIME.
A documentary.
Outtakes, rushes and alternate scenes from the film.

This is an excellent Dvd for Orson Welles fans. Highly recommended.

Orson Welles is my favorite filmaker. In order to be fair, I watched this dvd several times. I really wanted to like this film. It is probably the only Welles film I had difficulty watching. There are just too many problems beginning with a weak script. Welles also appears to have dubbed in the dialogue after filming. This was a big mistake since the sound seems so unrealistic throughout. (I would rather read subtitles than endure the poor, later-recorded soundtrack). Then there is Welles--usually the strength of every film--but this time his performance is strangely uninspired and his theatrical makeup is ludicrous. Since Welles is such a genius, the questions is: how could he have made THIS film?

Let's be clear: the many negative reviews of 'Mr. Arkadin' on this site refer to the shoddy editions that populated the marketplace prior to Criterion's definitive and gorgeous 2005 3-disc release. The film's chaotic production history was matched by an equally chaotic release history in which it circulated in as many as seven different versions under the various titles 'Mr. Arkadin' and 'Confidential Report'. Its copyright status was equally chaotic, leading to its definition as a public domain artefact and allowing opportunistic video and DVD releases by companies who cared nothing for the quality of the print or the integrity of the version they peddled.

Thankfully, with this splendid package, Criterion have made all other versions redundant and have revealed the full beauty, complexity, originality, wild humour and waywardness of Welles's conception. Shot on the run across Europe in 1954, financed on a shoestring budget, and edited in acrimonious circumstances with the producer throwing Welles out of the cutting room with less than a third of the work done, the film tells the tale of Van Stratten, a shady American smuggler, hired by Arkadin, a shady international finance capitalist, to investigate his past which, he claims, he has lost to amnesia. The commission itself, and the motives of the two principals, soon turn out to be far more sinister than they intially appear, gradually revealing a complex web of murder, espionage, white slavery and organised crime which resolves into a power struggle over ownership of the past and possession of the tycoon's beautiful and innocent daughter.

Criterion offer three versions of the film - the 1955 European release, the 1962 American release and a new version several minutes longer than any seen before and reconstructed according to Welles's plan to tell the story in complex flashback structure. In all versions the picture restoration is beautiful, allowing us to relish the bravura camerawork, captivating modernist editing and startling scene construction. And the longer version includes all the wonderful set-piece scenes that make the film so cherishable and outlandish: Arkadin menacing Van Stratten's girlfriend below-decks on his yacht as the room pitches wildly about; Van Stratten interrogating the Professor, an old associate of Arkadin's, as he runs his performing fleas through their paces; and a hilarious Michael Redgrave in a ratty old hairnet as an international fence, trying to sell Van Stratten a defective 'telioscope' which constantly increases in price.

In terms of plot, the film is a serio-comic hybrid of 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Lady from Shanghai', blending the quest for the shadowy history of the powerful capitalist with a noir crime story in which a hapless drifter is drawn into a web of intrigue with a twisted sexual motive at its centre. 'Mr. Arkadin' perhaps doesn't attain the greatness of those two predecessors, but in the Criterion version it stands as testament that Welles's original genius remained intact throughout his years of European exile, before he returned for his Hollywood swan song with the great 'Touch of Evil'.

Five stars for the brilliant Criterion package and the invaluable service it performs for film lovers and Wellesophiles; four and a half stars for the film itself - a typical Welles effort: bold, original and bewildering in equal measure.