Mr. Arkadin

Mr. Arkadin (first released in Spain, 1955), known in Britain as Confidential Report, is a French-Spanish-Swiss coproduction film, written and directed by Orson Welles and shot in several Spanish locations, including Costa Brava, Segovia, Valladolid, and Madrid. Filming took place throughout Europe in 1954, and scenes shot outside Spain include locations in London, Munich, Paris, the French Riviera, and at the Château de Chillon in Switzerland. Plot A small, fleet single engine plane flies empty across the daylight sky. A flashback voiceover begins to explain why, and who had been in it before it was abandoned. Guy Van Stratten, a penny-ante American smuggler working the docks in Naples, observes a man being chased in the darkness, and, seemingly, improbably, his one-legged pursuer. The quarry falls to the ground, stabbed, gasping with his last breaths the names "Gregory Arkadin", a famous international tycoon, a dark "oligarch" of his day with a dark and mysterious past, and, merely, “Sophie”. Stratten and his girlfriend and accomplice Mily travel to Arkadin’s castle in Spain, seeking to discover how these clues can be transformed into money. By striking up a friendship with Arkadin's mercurial daughter Raina, seemingly the only person for whom Arkadin feels affection, the womanizing Stratten gets himself invited inside. Arkadin has already learned of Stratten and Mily’s interest in him, and of the couple’s criminal history. Instead of turning them away he openly offers to pay Stratten $15,000 for uncovering information about his past, which he explains has been lost to amnesia. According to him, he woke up in a square in Switzerland in 1927 with 200,000 Swiss franks in his pocket and no memory whatever prior to that. He then parlayed this mysterious windfall into a new identity, enormous power, and uncountable wealth, but is troubled by not knowing who he was, and still is; Stratten impresses him as sufficiently enterprising, and ruthless, to find out, in, Arkadin demands, total secrecy. Always a user, Stratten continues to "romance" Raina, who plays at it to rebel against her overbearing - and disapproving - father.