About 30 minutes in I kept noticing that Welles was intentionally cutting every second or two, not letting the viewer rest their eyes on any shot without rudely interrupting their ability to look and soak in much. It was like dangling a piece of candy in front of a baby and every time the baby's reaches to grab, the candy is pulled away. Welles' Irish accent stuck out so much to the point of distraction. Why couldn't he just play it like a straight guy with his own natural dialect? He would have been more convincing sounding like Kane.

What bothered me at first is the way the film is edited and cut. I later learned that the original cut was about 2 hours and 20 minutes and the studio mutilated the work. Imagine how much greater this might have been without the sloppy, quick editing. At the same time it lent itself to the surreal dream-like effect of the movie. Scenes didn't quite unfold in a natural rhythm and often we'd get strange closeups or shots that lingered too briefly to interrupt the flow. Apparently the studio also had Welles reshoot to get glamorous footage of Rita Hayworth who they thought didn't have enough screen time.

The plot is complicated with double-crosses and twists that have you scratching your head, but the bravura filmmaking is still intact here with hypnotic shots, such as in the aquarium and other mesmerizing camera angles. I liked the courtroom scenes which played out like a satire on lawyers and the justice system. As the film flows along in surreal fashion, we get fabulous footage of traditional Chinese theater playing out on a theatrical stage in Shanghai. Welles was trying to give an oriental flavor to the picture.

Then we get one of the most memorable sequences and shots in film history: the fun house mirrors as Hayworth and Everett Sloane pull guns on each other and shoot at the reflections in the mirrors until they find their flesh targets. Welles’s earlier metaphor about sharks eating each other is now played out on the screen, with double layers of symbolism since both Hayworth and Sloane are perhaps mirror images of each other. Supposedly this fun house sequence was much longer and more intricate with a dummy lookalike of Hayworth with half her face being a skull. We lost what might have been one of the best films ever made by cutting an hour of footage. Despite being butchered by the studio and a commercial failure, somehow what remains still elevates the film into the canon of greatness. I must watch it again and with audio commentary.