Mr. Arkadin (first released in Spain, 1955), known in Britain as Confidential Report, is a French-Spanish-Swiss co-production film noir, written and directed by Orson Welles and shot in several Spanish locations, including Costa Brava, Segovia, Valladolid, and Madrid.

Filming took place throughout Europe in 1954, and scenes shot outside Spain include locations in London, Munich, Paris, the French Riviera, and at the Château de Chillon in Switzerland.

Guy Van Stratten, a small-time American smuggler working in Europe, seeks out a Munich resident named Jakob Zouk to warn him about a plot against his life.

Stratten’s story begins in Naples, where he gets a tip that Gregory Arkadin, a famous international oligarch of Georgian heritage, possesses a dark secret centred on the name “Sophie”.

Stratten and his girlfriend and accomplice Mily travel to Arkadin’s castle in Spain, hoping to use this meagre information for blackmail.

Arkadin says that in 1927 he woke up in a square in Switzerland, with a large sum of money in his pocket and no memory of his identity or past career.

He successfully rebuilt his life, but is troubled by not knowing how it began; Stratten impresses him as sufficiently discreet and enterprising to find out.

From interviews with a strange series of people—the proprietor of a flea circus, a junk-shop owner, an impoverished noblewoman in Paris, and a heroin addict he tortures with withdrawal—Stratten learns that the pre-1927 Arkadin was involved in a sex trafficking ring in Warsaw, abducting girls and selling them into prostitution in South America.

Stratten attends Arkadin's Christmas Eve party in Munich, where he learns the real purpose of his investigation.

Stratten hastens to find Jakob Zouk, the last surviving member of the sex trafficking ring, hoping to use him as some kind of weapon against Arkadin.

Raina has agreed to meet him at the airport; there he intends to reveal her father's secret, in the hope that this will break Arkadin’s spirit and make him abandon the plot.

Stratten and Raina connect at the airport, but she is almost immediately summoned to the control tower to talk to her father on the radio.

[3] The main inspiration for the plot was the episode entitled "Man of Mystery," though some elements may have been lifted from an episode of the radio show Ellery Queen entitled "The Case of the Number Thirty-One," chiefly the similar-sounding name George Arkaris, the mysterious birthplace, the French Riviera property, and the Spanish castle.

[4] In an interview for the BBC's Arena series first shown in 1982, Welles described Mr. Arkadin as the "biggest disaster" of his life because of his loss of creative control.

[citation needed] Welles's friend Maurice Bessy, a French screenwriter, is generally considered to be the author of the novel.

[12] This version is often erroneously thought of as being in the public domain but as the film is a European co-production its copyright does not expire until 2068, seventy years after the 1998 death of the last surviving co-creator, composer Paul Misraki.

Research by film scholar François Thomas in the papers of Louis Dolivet has uncovered documentary proof that Bessy was indeed the author.

It was compiled in 2006 by Stefan Drössler of the Munich Film Museum and Claude Bertemes of the Cinémathèque municipale de Luxembourg, with both Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum giving technical assistance.

However, it remains an approximation; for instance, Welles remarked that his version of the film began with a woman's body (Mily) on a beach, including a close-up that makes her identity apparent.

"[18] Filmmaker Christopher Nolan stated in his Criterion Top 10 from 2013, "No one could make much of a case for Welles’ abortive movie overall" but that the film contains "heartbreaking glimpses of the great man’s genius".