Arkadeen, Arkadini, Arkapopoulos—those are the sarcastic suggestions offered by a low-rent American post-war grifter as the real name of the mysterious international tycoon whose past he's investigating. And the investigation is being paid for by the tycoon himself—played by Orson Welles, with an outrageously false beard and, for that matter, an outrageously theatrical manner that, nonetheless, masks nothing of his identity.
The most famous moment of this extraordinary, and unjustly unrecognized, movie, from 1954 (and released the next year in a mutilated version), is a soliloquy that Arkadin delivers to his entourage. It stands on its own as a beacon of pulp philosophy while offering a self-definition that is as much a boast as a lament: the parable of the scorpion and the frog, in which the scorpion, while being ferried across a river by a frog, stings it, thus killing the frog and drowning himself in the process:
I reviewed the three-disk set of the film (or three versions thereof) that Criterion released in 2006; I was struck by the anguish and the self-loathing that the film displays. Essentially, it’s a gloss on “Citizen Kane,” which he made a decade and a half earlier, and which proved to be a great start to a desperate career. It deepens and redoubles the questions of Kane in that the subject of the inquiry, Arkadin himself, is its instigator—and Arkadin follows the investigator on a double trail: the investigator’s and his own. And it’s proof, if any were needed, that what makes Welles Welles isn’t the panoply of technical effects, such as deep-focus shots and long takes, that are on view in “Citizen Kane” and that many critics still fetishize to this day; it’s the moral essence of his work, or, simply, his character.
