Directed by Orson Welles
France, Spain, Switzerland • 1955 • 93 mins.
Bearing key similarities to The Third Man, Welles’ noir concerns small-time smuggler Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden), who overhears a dying man whisper the name “Gregory Arkadin.” Armed with this clue and in search of blackmail money, Van Stratten works his way into the inner circle of well-to-do amnesiac Arkadin. Arkadin hires Van Stratten to research his former life before the amnesia, but as Van Stratten digs deeper people begin turning up dead. Full of delirious canted angles and gorgeous location photography spanning Europe and Mexico, Confidential Report is “extraordinary, and unjustly unrecognized.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker.
Appears in: Orson Welles at 100