At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  We also glimpse deliberately imagined urban terrains where traces of the past break through the material structures of the city. These palimpsestic spaces make for a suitable metaphor for postwar Europe. They reinforce Welles’s privileging of antiquated cultural affiliations, idealised and evoked in nostalgic reverie or symbolic objects, over the arbitrary political divisions of nationhood and the ideological divide of the Cold War. This is most pronounced in the rubblescape of Munich.

  * * *

  In the best of today’s films, there’s always an airport scene, and the best yet is in Confidential Report when Arkadin finds the plane full and shouts out that he will offer $10,000 to any passenger who will give him his seat. It is a marvelous variation on Richard III’s cry, “My kingdom for a horse,” in terms of the atomic age.

  – François Truffaut, 195643

  In the ‘St-Germain-des-Prés’ episode of Around the World with Orson Welles, filmed in 1955 after his departure from the Arkadin editing suite, Welles diplomatically lauds the airlines of Europe, but also voices nostalgia for “old-fashioned travel of all kinds. Not only old-fashioned trains … but old boats and barges and gondolas and canoes, ox-carts … anything that takes long enough to give you a chance to see where you’re going before you get there.”44

  The port city of Naples was devastated during the war, but its rubble is not depicted in Mr. Arkadin. Welles shot at least part of the Naples sequence, the murder of Braco, in Madrid.45 The sequence is built from expressionistic low-angle and canted shots which sometimes pan non-horizontally in a clever visual echo of the lopsided run of Braco’s peg-legged assassin. Welles projects the assassin’s distorted shadow against shipping crates. The montage does not maintain any sort of coherent spatial continuity in any version of the film. According to Lucidi, the first four sequences in the ‘Corinth’ version – which would therefore include the Naples sequence – appear as Welles intended.46 The fictional space of Naples marries the iconography of ships and trains – two typical transitory settings of the 1930s ‘serious thriller’.

  But time has moved on and air travel now provides the dominant passage of movement for the powerful. The expansive international settings of Mr. Arkadin are only possible in the age of flight. The plane’s centrality to the world of Arkadin is indicated by the opening image in all versions – an empty plane in the sky. Later, the incredible reach of Van Stratten’s international investigation is conveyed by montage sequences incorporating images of planes and airports. Key moments of drama occur at airports in Barcelona and Munich. In one deleted scene Van Stratten and Raina talk on a tarmac, presumably in Barcelona, and leave Raina’s glum English suitor sitting alone on a ramp stairway leading nowhere.47

  The age of air travel in Mr. Arkadin

  At the edges of the tarmac in Barcelona are half-completed concrete buildings that resemble the unfinished structures surrounding Sebastianplatz in Munich. Yet whereas rubble-strewn Munich exposes layers of its history, El Prat airport in Barcelona is a bland open tarmac in arid country.

  The drama’s climactic moment occurs in Barcelona’s central air-traffic control tower. Here Raina communicates with her disembodied father, who is mostly represented by shots of a ceiling-mounted loudspeaker. With Arkadin’s suicide the loudspeaker falls silent.

  The variant versions of Mr. Arkadin indicate that the film’s international settings were not fixed from conception but evolved over the long period of production. Apart from ‘Man of Mystery’, Welles left as evidence other early drafts (of sorts): the March 1953 Masquerade script, the ghostwritten novelisation, and the Spanish versions. This Masquerade script sets Arkadin’s masked ball in Venice rather than its eventual location, Spain. In that version of the script Welles explicitly cites as precedent the ball thrown by the Mexican millionaire Carlos de Beistegui in Venice on 3 September 1951.48 Welles was in attendance and reported on the event for the Italian weekly Epocha:

  Rehearsing at St. James’s Theatre in London I thought about the costume I would wear to the ball. Impossible to move Othello into the eighteenth century. Too far. Cagliostro was just right. I got there without the costume, of course, which hadn’t arrived from Rome. I get distracted, as everyone knows. Some think I do it deliberately. But that evening, at eight o’clock, I suddenly realized I had no costume. I had to improvise. At the [Hotel] Danieli they found me a turban, something between a lady’s art nouveau hat and the headdress of a Sioux Indian chief…49

  Other guests included Gene Tierney, Salvador Dalí, and Christian Dior. Winston Churchill, also in the city, had to skip the party lest he appear to his constituents as indulging in “conspicuous luxury”.50 When the film became a Spanish co-production, this long party segment was transferred to a castle whose exteriors were provided by the Castillo Alcázar in Segovia. Welles drew on Francisco de Goya to create the visual motifs of the ball.

  The early incarnations use New York City as the setting for Arkadin’s dinner with the Baroness Nagel. The Spanish versions include establishing shots of the New York City skyline and dialogue that describes the Baroness (played here by Amparo Rivelles) as a saleswoman on Fifth Avenue. The second confrontation scene between Arkadin, Van Stratten, and Raina also occurs in New York. The ‘Corinth’ version and Confidential Report shift these events to Paris, adding location shots of Van Stratten in Pigalle, outside Maxim’s restaurant, and in conversation with a man played by Louis Dolivet in sight of the Eiffel Tower. Paris was the last of Arkadin’s locations to be filmed, although there seems not to be any particular dramatic reason for these scenes to have occurred in Paris rather than New York.

  Hired by Arkadin to investigate the tycoon’s amnesia-clouded origins, Van Stratten sets out with all expenses paid. Two variant versions of the same montage sequence contain totally different investigative itineraries. Van Stratten’s variant voice-overs narrate a montage of cross-faded shots, some of which appear to be stock footage and others to be shot especially for Arkadin: the point of view inside a wheel well as a plane lifts off the ground, display boards listing international destinations, Van Stratten crossing the tarmac in front of a stationary Aerolíneas Argentinas jet, a taxiing TWA plane, and then Van Stratten’s interviews with people in various outdoor urban locations. The interview shots are often concluded by a whip-pan (always to the right) that cuts mid-blur into the next shot. This transitional device goes back as far as the breakfast sequence of Citizen Kane, but Welles would use it extensively in Around the World the following year.

  The images are identical in each version, but the voice-over varies. In the ‘Corinth’ version, Van Stratten narrates:

  I did a lot of travelling and asked an awful lot of questions before I learned the truth. From Helsinki to Léopoldville, Brussels, Belgrade, Beirut, Torino and Trieste, Marseille and Mogador. I talked to every crook who’d even been around in 1927. And a whole lot of other characters, besides.

  And in Confidential Report:

  My travels took me from Helsinki to Tunis, Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, Zurich, Trieste, Marseille, Copenhagen. I talked to every crook who’d even been around in 1927. And a whole lot of other characters, too.

  The variations are probably two alternative improvised takes from the same dubbing session. The cities Van Stratten visits have no particular political or historical significance; the names seem to have been plucked out of the air, in the first version for their alliterative value. But the striking impression gained from both versions is Van Stratten’s ease and speed of movement while on Arkadin’s payroll. Welles lived a similarly fast, peripatetic, aeroplane-enabled working life in the 1950s as he struggled to make films across Europe. And yet, even in Welles’s privileged position as an international film star, he was frustrated by the limitations on his freedom of movement.

  Shortly after making Arkadin, Welles filmed a television monologue denouncing “red tapism and bureaucracy” in relation to “freedom of movement”.51 The age of the Iron Curtain clearly restricted movement between East and West,
but there were also numerous other bureaucratic restrictions of movement within Western Europe before the invention of the European Union.

  Welles’s essay ‘For a Universal Cinema’ lamented the logistical difficulties of Pan-European filmmaking in this era:

  I was developing the rushes of Arkadin in a French lab. Can you imagine that I had to have a special authorization for every piece of film, even if only 20 yards long, that arrived from Spain? The film had to go through the hands of the customs officials, who wasted their time (and ours) by stamping the beginning and end of each and every roll of film or of magnetic sound tape. The operation required two whole days, and the film was in danger of being spoiled by the hot weather we were then having. The same difficulties cropped up when it came to obtaining work permits.

  My film unit was international: I had a French cameraman, an Italian editor, an English sound engineer, an Irish script girl, a Spanish assistant. Whenever we had to travel anywhere, each of them had to waste an unconscionable amount of time getting special permissions to stay to work… Similar complications arose when, for example, we had to get a French camera into Spain…

  Welles cited the problem of producers who “prefer the security of a limited but certain profit from a national or regional market to the infinitely wider possibilities of a world market, which would of course entail, at the outset, certain supplementary expenses”.52 He also wrote: “The challenge of time is one that I can accept… I am perfectly willing to fight that duel. But there is another, the futile and insidious struggle against the thousand and one formalities by which cinema finds itself chained down.”53

  The logistical torment of Welles’s European co-production was foreshadowed in the film’s very subject matter. The bureaucratic “importance of papers” that we see in the Ambler novels of the 1930s is updated to the Cold War. It is significant that at the outset Van Stratten is a petty smuggler jailed in Naples for bringing contraband American cigarettes into Italy (Bessy’s novelisation gives more detail on Van Stratten’s work for Thaddeus’s smuggling operation out of Tangiers). Van Stratten acquires true freedom of movement only when he goes on Arkadin’s payroll as an investigator. The moment is marked by a series of jump-cuts depicting different currencies thrown down onto a table. Arkadin’s wealth and access to the network of air travel diminish the relevance of national borders.

  Eric Rohmer recognised this at the time of the initial European release of Confidential Report:

  [Arkadin’s] wealth resides less in possessions than in that most modern of powers, mobility, the ability to be present at practically the same time in every part of the globe. A life of travel, of palaces, seems gilded with a magic that sedentary luxury has lost … the power of money is depicted with a precision that only Balzac would not have envied.54

  This ‘power in mobility’ is only possible in the age of air travel. As if to underscore that point, when Arkadin is unable to secure a seat on the Christmas Eve plane from Munich to Barcelona in order to prevent Van Stratten’s revelations to Raina – his “My kingdom for a horse” moment, as Truffaut put it – he takes advantage of the luxury of a private plane that he pilots himself. When he believes his past has been exposed to Raina, Arkadin abdicates his metaphorical throne by jumping to suicide.

  * * *

  The city of Munich is at the centre of Mr. Arkadin, most particularly in the ‘Corinth’ version, which preserves the most extensive structural frame for flashbacks. Nevertheless, the 1956 Confidential Report offers a unique element in Van Stratten’s opening voice-over, which specifically locates Jakob Zouk’s attic at ‘Sebastianplatz 16’, a non-existent address in Munich; the location is actually the tenement behind Sebastianplatz 3. The film does not attempt architectural verisimilitude. A fictional cinematic space was constructed freely, and sometimes clumsily, from the material shot on location, quite possibly by Welles himself in the editing room. One example among many: in both the ‘Corinth’ version and Confidential Report, Van Stratten appears to enter the snow-blanketed courtyard of the tenement, cross the courtyard while gazing up to the attic, and then prepare to mount the stairs. In actuality he has entered the courtyard twice in successive shots from two entirely different entrances. Arkadin’s later entrance into the same courtyard replicates this nonsensical movement and succession of shots.

  In the various exterior shots of Munich, particularly around what purports to be Sebastianplatz, Van Stratten wanders through a ‘berubbled mise-en-scène’, a term I borrow from Robert R. Shandley’s analysis of Germany’s Trümmerfilme (‘rubble film’) cycle of 1946–49. Some of the better-known titles in that cycle include Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us, Wolfgang Staudte, 1946) and Zwischen Gestern und Morgan (Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, Harald Braun, 1947).55

  The rubble films have not been historically valued for their aesthetic qualities; after all, German films of this era were subject to the control of the occupying Allied military forces, intended to be a propaganda tool to ideologically rehabilitate the German public in the post-Nazi era. But recent critical re-evaluations have argued for the rubble films’ ability to evoke the political complexities of their historical moment through their presentation of berubbled space. Between Yesterday and Tomorrow was shot at Munich’s Regina Palast Hotel, which had been partially destroyed in the war. The film tells parallel narratives of pre- and postwar events, drifting between the damaged and surviving sections of the hotel. As Jennifer Fay observes, “the filmed images of the hotel signify both palimpsestically and spatially”. Moreover, the film “encrypts the provisionality and temporality of life in catastrophe’s wake. […] [It] participates in a materialist historical reckoning that is concerned with the erasure of history and the end of a corrupt social order whose remnants are everywhere.”56 Ironically, many other films in this cycle were shot in studios rather than in actual berubbled locations.57

  While Shandley restricts his canon to German films made in the period 1946–49, the Munich sequences of Mr. Arkadin seem to constitute a kind of ‘rubble film’, even though Mr. Arkadin emerged from a completely different production model, censorship regime, and later period.

  In a rubblescape the damaged structures reveal traces of the past. In Welles’s Munich the bombed, broken walls reveal layers of historical strata – concrete, bricks, and stone. The city is a palimpsest. Partially destroyed buildings expose anachronistic relics from the past, such as the horse carriages of ‘Sebastianplatz’. The unfinished prefabricated concrete buildings herald the future. But despite first appearances, Arkadin does not innocently or inadvertently document a passing historical moment in the postwar reconstruction of Munich. The ‘berubbled mise-en-scène’ was not merely found while shooting on location in Munich but instead contrived with exhilarating artfulness.

  The Christmas setting is dramatically essential to provide a trigger for Zouk’s nostalgia for goose liver. For many decades the shooting chronology, like so much other information concerning the Arkadin project, was obscure. Now it is known that the Christmas scenes were filmed in Munich during April and May of 1954 – mild springtime.58 The wintry city is so convincingly faked with banked snow and billowing flakes – all the bitterness of a Bavarian winter – that few seem to have ever realised those scenes were not really shot in December.

  Van Stratten in the Munich rubblescape

  Welles hardly pursued the methods of the Italian neorealists when shooting on location. He did not seek to film some equivalent of documentary ‘truth’. In the 1950s he pursued ways of transforming found urban structures – immovable streets and buildings – by embellishing them with powerfully symbolic detritus. Radically adapting what he found in real locations served Welles’s dramatic, thematic, and ideological purposes. We see this again a few years later in Touch of Evil.

  Welles had already publicly expressed the very criticisms of contemporary Germany at the centre of his imagined Munich in Mr. Arkadin. He had staged his theatrical revue An Evening with Orson Well
es throughout Germany in the summer of 1950, and caused an uproar when he accused the country of lingering Nazism in a newspaper column.59 That phenomenon is directly implied in Arkadin by the upside-down Hitler portrait and a swastika abandoned by a previous tenant in Jakob Zouk’s attic. As Welles later told Peter Bogdanovich, “There’s been instant de-Nazification, so of course the attics all over Germany filled up with such sacred relics.”60 The attic interior was a studio set in Madrid and the sequence was among the earliest filmed, shot long before the production moved on location to Munich.61

  Van Stratten’s search for the goose liver takes us into the streets of Munich by night. His comic quest allows Welles to emphasise again the bombed-out cityscape, its engulfing shadows and silhouetted ruins.

  The Allies had bombed Munich numerous times during the war. Jeffrey Diefendorf’s In the Wake of War recounts that Munich was left with five million cubic metres of rubble, supposedly double the matter contained within the Great Pyramid. It covered thirty-three per cent of the city. But of the big German cities, Munich was among the quickest to be cleared. Even by mid-1949, eighty per cent of its wartime rubble was gone.62 Certainly by the time of Mr. Arkadin, Munich had overwhelmingly been rebuilt.

  The Hollywood thriller The Devil Makes Three (Andrew Marton, 1952) was filmed partly on location in Munich a few years before Arkadin. It begins with a prologue, an authoritative direct-to-camera address by a United States military officer. He establishes a chronology of Munich’s postwar reconstruction as of 1952, showing both the restoration of the city’s traditional architecture and the construction of new Modernist buildings.