Mr Arkadin

Long unavailable for theatrical screening but finally resurfacing on TV in a version edited closer to Welles' cut than that originally released here, Mr Arkadin assumed an equivalent patina of myth and legend to that cultivated by its central character, non-naturalistically posited somewhere between Kane and God. Arkadin is the powerful financier who employs his own researcher to piece together his apparently forgotten past, to find a shabby Rosebud to dramatise his by-now bored puppeteering. Flamboyantly melodramatic, it's a playfully egocentric display of egocentrism and a magician's perverse revelation of his own trickery. Failure or not, it's irresistible.