Virginia Mayo as "Nikki Dos Equis 18"
Anyway, skimming through the book, there's much less material on Mr. Arkadin than I thought (a scant 8 pages, with half of those being Bogdanovich asking questions). It looks like Orson Welles didn't really want to talk about the movie - he mentions that it was a "super movie story" and that he would love to make it again, and make it the right way, but he doesn't even know who holds the rights to it. As I said before, it was based on an idea he'd had for the Harry Lime radio show, but which he decided to save for a motion picture. The original movie was told in a series of flashbacks, but he claims he's blocked out how he'd planned to do it since he has such bad memories of what happened with the movie. Apparently he took too long in the editing room and missed a deadline, putting the film in the hands of the distributors, who sent their own editor in to finish it, and he proceeded to remove the whole structure the movie was based on. He also cut out a lot of the "sentimental" scenes Welles had filmed of Arkadin, which made the character more sympathetic.
Welles claims Arkadin is very different from Harry Lime since Arkadin is Russian, which gives him a wicked sentimental streak and a gregariousness which the much colder, calculating Harry Lime lacks. The idea being that he's basically erasing his past so as not to embarass himself in front of his daughter. Welles says Arkadin is a very sympathetic character, while Van Statten is supposed to be seen as odious and shallow.
