Mr. Arkadin (The Corinth Version) (1955), directed by Orson Welles. Saturday, March 11, Criterion Channel at home.

I guess I never really noticed how Mr. Arkadin, yet another butchered film from Orson Welles, is so similar to Citizen Kane. A secretive industrialist, Gregory Arkadin (Welles), hires the greedy, will-do-nearly-anything-for-a-buck Guy Van Stratten (a very strange Robert Arden) to investigate his (Arkadin’s) life. Arkadin claims he doesn’t know how he became rich, that he just woke up one day in Switzerland with a bunch of money, which he used to become fabulously wealthy. Van Stratten goes all over the world to interview past associates, with sinister results. As with most of Welles’ laster films, this one has weird dubbing, incredible camerawork, a bizarre and over-the-top performance by Welles (which I enjoy tremendously–I like that stagey, ham acting when it’s done right), strange costumes, and it seems to be about the life of Welles himself. Like Kane, which is both about the ludicrously rich Hearst and Orson Welles himself, Arkadin is about, again, another terrible human being with a lot of money (supposedly based on some financier who screwed Welles over when making another film, I think Othello), but is also very much about Welles. Who am I? he seems to be asking in this weird little noir, as if pointing out that he, too, just appeared, rich with ideas, when he was 25, in Hollywood, and made this amazing film called Citizen Kane.