I didn’t take a shine to Orson Welles‘ “Mr. Arkadin,” which I believe I saw under the “Confidential Report” title back in grad school. My recollection was that it screened as a very rough print, and probably short enough to not make nearly as much sense as it should have.

Such was the state of Welles’ legacy, his lesser known and even best known films, in the years after his death.

But efforts in the early 2000s to restore it and perhaps return some of the “lost” footage recovered in other prints fleshed the movie out. The Criterion Collection has a “comprehensive” cut of it that runs 1:47, the shortest versions — there are seven in all — ran just under or over an hour and a half.

And now the cheap cineaste’s best friend, Tubi, has a fine-looking print that runs 1:40, the so-called “Corinth” version (discovered and rescued by Welles’ pal Peter Bogdanovich), which may be pretty close to Welles’ original intention. It makes sense. It’s flashy in all the best Wellesian ways, echoing earlier films of his and others (“The Third Man” and “Journey into Fear,” for instance), presaging his turn as Falstaff in “Chimes at Midnight.”

Welles himself pops off the screen in one of his most colorful performances, a brooding, bearded, towering presence (often filmed from below) to whom he’d add a twinkle to become “Falstaffian” for “Chimes.”

As a Welles thriller, it’s fun and brisk, and compares favorably to “The Stranger” and his work in Norman Foster’s (Welles directed some of it) “Journey into Fear,” if not on a par with “Lady from Shanghai” or that masterpiece that was Charlton Heston’s gift to Welles and cinema history — “Touch of Evil.”

The future Mrs. Welles, Paola Mori, was “introduced” in this film, playing the jealously-protected daughter of the title character. Her dialogue was looped/dubbed by Billie Whitelaw, but the soundtrack and editing here don’t give away Welles’ frequent dubbing of co-stars’ dialogue during his broke, “bad sound” years of Euro-filmmaking.

But those years also offered him an embarassment of riches when it came to casting. Michael Redgrave and veteran character players Akim Tamiroff, Mischa Auer, Jack Watling, Suzanne Flon, Peter Van Eyck and even Gert Frobe (as a German cop) turn up, most of them heard in their own voices.

The plot, which Welles cobbled together out of episodes of his British radio series, “The Adventures of Harry Lime,” based on his character from “The Third Man,” concerns an American hustler and cigarette smuggler, Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) who gets caught up in intrigues and murder when he’s hired to investigate Europe’s most mysterious post-war millionaire, Gregory Arkadin.

The fellow who hires Van Stratten is Arkadin himself (Welles), whose name was whispered to Guy and his “bubble dancer” girlfriend Mily (Patricia Medina) by a man (Grégoire Aslan) they find bleeding out, freshly-stabbed on the docks of Naples.

Despite the fact that Arkadin “runs the greatest spy system in Europe,” he wants Van Stratten to follow the clues offered by that dying man in Italy. Claiming “amnesia,” Arkadin is plainly concerned about his past, perhaps because the rich man with villas all over and a castle in Spain (Segovia was a filming location) doesn’t want his daughter to know who and what made him. References to running faulty guns to “the communists in China” and “building roads for Mussolini” in Ethiopia tip us off.

As Van Stratten starts traveling the world on Arkadin’s dime, learning Arkadin’s “story,” the word “gang” comes up, time and again. What has he gotten himself into?

As the story is framed within a flashbacks from a fretful “I’d better tell you my story” conversation with a broke German ex-con (Tamiroff) in snowy Munich. As Van Stratten insists that he “save” this crook’s life “to save my own,” we know the young American has finally figured this mystery out. He has 100 minutes to clue us in.

“Arkadin” is a showy travelogue of Spanish festivals, French restaurants, snowy, half-ruined German tenaments, posh parties and quirky encounters with people who “knew” Arkadin “back then.”

Redgrave is a playful, down-market Dutch antiques dealer, Auer the ringleader of the cinema’s most complete depiction of a working, functioning and literal “flea circus. Flon is a “baroness,” and Terrence Longdon the “secretary” who keeps Van Stratten on the right path.

Peter van Eyck is well-cast as a well-heeled heel and would-be suitor for Raina, the rich man’s daughter. Van Stratten may act as if he’s got a shot, bowling Raina over with his bluff American charms. But he’s just using her to get to the rich man, who has already acquired Van Stratten’s “girl” Mily as part of his floating, yacht-bound menagarie.

Welles was prepping “Moby Dick Rehearsed” for a London stage production in the same year, and used his actors-leaning-in-time to the waves as a fake-at-sea gimmick in both this film and that play.

“Arkadin” has little of the characteristic Welles playfulness, but is brimming over with anecdotes, tales related by this or that character, a storytelling technique left over from his radio years. This is the film in which he, in character, tells the fable of the frog and the scorpion, a tale repeated in scads of films in the years since.

As in “Citizen Kane,” characters are interviewed about Arkadin, with some revealing more than others. Our “hero” passes himself off as a Time Magazine reporter to get to them.

At one time, Arden’s performance was one of the many ways this film was unfairly dismissed. But in a restored film, he comes off as a crisp American “type,” a focused chancer, offended when Arkadin dismisses him as “a mere gigolo, a petty adventurer.”

He puts the moves on Raina with a blunt rejection, which she finds irresistible.

“As long as I live, I’m never gonna ask em to marry you.”

The search for “a secret which does not exist” turns repetitive and we feel we’re a step or two ahead of Van Stratten for most of the middle acts, which slows the tale’s momentum.

But “Mr. Arkadin” feels far less constrained by budget limitations and by Welles’ loss of “control,” than other movies of his post-“Caine” career. Like “Othello,” what we see is inventive, another testament to the filmmaker’s “genuis.” And like “Touch of Evil,” the best version of what survived his loss of “control” may be the briskest. As with “Evil,” editing for pace pays off, even if it wasn’t directly “Welles-approved.”

Rating: TV-PG, violence

Cast: Orson Welles, Robert Arden, Paola Mori, Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave, Mischa Auer, Patricia Medina, Grégoire Aslan, Suzanne Flon, Katina Paxinou and Peter van Eyck

Credits: Scripted and directed by Orson Welles. A Corinth Films release on Tubi.

Running time: 1:40