The film was a failure but still worth watching for a few Orson Welles touches

Despite its many flaws and shortcomings, it's still worth watching Orson Welles's Mr. Arkadin (1955) for a few glimpses of what Welles could do at his best. Of course he was a colossal egotist, and he's all over this film: director, writers of screenplay, writer of the original story, star in title role, and producer and who knows probably caterer and driver, too? But that's why we watch his films, in part - to see the great struggle of the individual v the colossus. The colossus usually wins, of course, as it did in this case; it's not clear to me (I will look around a little more) whether the film was actually released, and it exists today in at least three versions (I watched the version that Criterion considers the most complete and accurate - though it still leaves some strange gaps in the narrative). In essence, the story is a quest: A guy doing some smuggling on the docks in Italy comes to the aid of a man who was stabbed in the back, and man utters a few dying words - including "Arkadin" - which lead the man on a world-wide chase after the elusive Mr. Arkadin, who eventually hires the man allegedly to find out about A's own early life, which A claims to have forgotten in a bout of amnesia. So we get lots of globehopping, entanglements w/ 2 women - the female sidekick who'll sacrifice so much in aid of this quest and A's daughter, the dangerous woman/love interest. Ultimately the plot is ridiculous and collapses of its own weight (it doesn't help that Welles gets such poor performances from most of the other main characters - it's all about him, of course), but it's always entertaining to see the weird Welles touches at various points in the film, especially the huge party in A's Spanish mansion with various celebrators and a parade of barefoot penitents, the creepy junk shop in Amsterdam (a scene not helped by Michael Redgrave's over-the-top comic acting), the attic scenes and the surprising demise of Herr Zuk, the beautifully staged dinner-dance party in A's Paris mansion. Who knows how many scenes were lost or how many compromises Welles had to make in the production of this film; same held true for his Spanish production of Chimes at Midnight - which was far more successful, in part because OW was well cast in the lead (Falstaff), a truly dominant figure, much more so than the enigmatic Mr. A of this film.