20. Radio Noir: MR ARKADIN (1955)

Tipping My Fedora

Will the real "Mr Arkadin" please stand up?

For the podcast's first foray into audio noir, we tip our hat to Orson Welles - whose birthday it was this past week - and look at the strange case of his noir maudit, MR ARKADIN. Also released as CONFIDENTIAL REPORT, we will consider the many iterations of the film (following in the path of Jonathan Rosenbaum's seminal essay, The Seven Arkadins, first published in Film Comment magazine in 1992). Incredibly, the various versions - including radio dramas and novelisations as well as variant edits of the film, has now risen to a total of 10 separate Arkadins!

We will also present the full audio drama from which the film was primarily derived, Man of Mystery, one of 8 (or 9) episodes that Welles was known to have written for his The Lives of Harry Lime radio series (first heard round the world from 1951 to 1952).

The entire Harry Lime series of 52 half hour episodes is available for download from the Internet Archive at this link: https://archive.org/details/TheLivesOfHarryLime

To read Rosenbaum's original essay, please visit his homepage at this link: jonathanrosenbaum.net/