Word: flashbacks
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...minor flaws in all but one of Orson Welles' extraordinary films are particularly maddening because they are unnecessary. Since 1940, when Citizen Kane synthesized Horatio Alger and the "film noir" into a critical success, he has used the same ideas, the same flashback techniques, and even the same evil Prometheus as his protagonist. But these methods could not make the the story of a pathetic border sheriff in Touch of Evil as interesting as the life of Charles Foster Kane. Mr. Arkadin has a more heroic figure than the sheriff, but Welles' personal triumph in the title role cannot compensate...
...alas, the flashback technique is overused, and the story becomes confused at times. The plot deals with the fortunes of Guy van Stratten, a tough American smuggler who falls in with Gregory Arkadin, a wealthy but mysterious citizen of the world. Van Stratten's attempt to blackmail the millionaire through his daughter Raina proves unsuccessful, but the American is hired to trace Arkadin's unknown past...
...minded: four thousand strings equal desert motif; four thousand strings plus two harps equal sea motif. The beginning, which shows O'Toole meeting his death in a post-war motorcycle accident, is irrelevant to everything else. This of course makes the entire movie, minus about three minutes, an enormous flashback...
...opening flashback to the eve of World War I, Nick Jenkins is a small boy living in his father's country house at Stonehurst. The servants and the horses are in their quarters. The chef is good. All seems secure. There are no local portents of doom except a hysterical maid who appears to serve the mousse stark naked and is promptly whisked belowstairs in a Madras shawl...
Their conversation soon turns toward last year as X insists that they were lovers. He widely recounts their words and the camera dissolves to the past in the middle of a direct quotation completed by the X of the flashback. This is the supposed past, the fourth level...