Restoring Mr Arkadin

Film "Perfectionist auteurs have become well known for monkeying with their movies up until the last minute and beyond, but how do you release a DVD director's cut if you don't know how the director himself would have finished the film? And how daunting is that job when the director is as formidable a legend as Orson Welles himself? [...] That was the challenge faced by New York's Criterion Collection when it decided to restore Welles' 1955 film, Mr. Arkadin. "The film had been re-edited many times by many different people in various territories, as Welles had been taking too long to edit it himself," recalls Criterion's technical director, Lee Kline. "There was film everywhere, but each was a different cut." -- Iain Blair for Studio Daily [via]