Of course, even bad Welles is absorbing cinema; but how can one so praise a filmmaker without sounding condescending? The point is that [in Mr. Arkadin] Welles has a film that holds one's interest continually and yet is disappointing and embarrassing. This film is all technique and bravura and theatricality, but is utterly lacking in significance. It is a kind of decadence, with over-decorated sets, over-busy camera, over-characterized characters from Welles' grab-bag of international types. Because this is a "personal" film, so called, we expect a chaste and trembling virgin, but instead we find the mechanical passion and tired tricks of the over-rouged street-walker.

Welles has written here a vehicle for himself…. Such a voice needs a masterful writer of the epic stamp—Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Melville…. Such talent, and so little substance—small wonder that we are embarrassed.

Welles has here the undeveloped modicum of a major film. He is fascinated by the financial world's equivalent of himself—the lone, cold-hearted, versatile, and manipulative titan bursting with energy. The trouble is that Welles cannot organize his intuition into a coherent comment. His Tamburlaine of high finance is never seen in relationship to his wealth…. In the same way, we are told that Arkadin is a formidable sensualist, but we don't witness anything on the screen that would yield this extra dimension to the man's character…. This film, like others from Welles, is strangely asexual and, indeed, anti-sexual. The protagonist in these works is invariably isolated from even basic, elemental sexual contacts.

A further word about the story situation: the starting point of the film is "character," particularly the parable of the scorpion and the frog. Dialogue is unrelieved irony. There is no genuine menace, only off-screen maneuverings to which on-screen characters react. The film's central anecdote is leavened with humor, but the predominant tone is serious … and rather trivial. (pp. 36-7)

Welles' fundamental mistake in this film—and it may be the mistake that explains his entire career—has to do with Arkadin's supposed "tragic dignity", to use Welles' term…. Tragedy is a word much maligned in our time of a democratic application of its meaning to every pathetic situation that occurs in life…. Tragedy has to do with much more than "character", frogs, and scorpions. Tragedy has to do with wasted goodness and a strong character actuated by selfless, noble impulses identified with his own image. A tragic character is concerned with ultimate law informing us of Man, not simply of men as commonly individualized (in this case by Welles' Hallowe'en disguise). Tragic grandeur is awesome and mighty. Such figures are not private integers having no relation to their society, but rather are deliberate testers and discoverers of life's necessities. Such men are committed, perhaps irrationally, to some ethical standard outside of themselves, and this commitment presupposes a degree of optimism, an impulse toward perfectibility. In the Who's Who of tragedy—Ahab, Lear, Oedipus, et al—it is worse than pretentious to include the name of Arkadin. If film is content to be regarded as merely a secondary art, then let us be satisfied with such melodramas as this, all atmosphere and pulpy philosophy; but if film would aspire to the stature of dramatic literature, then let it enlarge our awareness through work that achieves true tragic dignity. (p. 37)