Removed entirely from Orson Welles’ creative control in post-production, Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report) is what happens when extraordinary directorial imagination meets inflexible production restrictions. Considered by some a near-miss masterpiece, by others an interesting failure, and by Welles himself his “biggest disaster,” the film is artistically fascinating as a symbol of postwar dislocation even if, for many, it lacks the narrative coherence and tonal unity of Welles’ more esteemed works. In addition to serving as writer, director, producer, and editor, Welles himself plays the title character, a wealthy European tycoon who can’t remember his life before 1927 so he hires an American fortune hunter and black marketeer named Guy Van Stratten (a forgettable Robert Arden) to investigate his life story, which suits Van Stratten just fine since he’d already been tipped off by a dying man on a dock that the Arkadin name leads to profit. (It will also lead to criminal enterprise and murder). To help in his quest, Van Stratten ingratiates himself with Arkadin’s beautiful daughter Raina (Paola Mori), much to the displeasure of his existing love interest Mily (Patricia Medina). Spanning a variety of continental settings, Van Stratten becomes a sort of Don Quixote (one of the film’s production studios is Cervantes Films) encountering wildly diverse characters — a junk dealer, a baroness, a flea circus owner, a heroin addict — in increasingly frenetic venues — a religious march of black-hooded penitents, a Goya-themed masquerade ball, a raucous Christmas party. While his visual extravagance would reach its zenith seven years later in The Trial (1962), Welles’ baroque production design and bravura cinematography — endless whips and pans, slow zooms, disorienting Dutch angles for almost every action scene — make the film a riveting sensory experience, even for those viewers who get lost along the way.