TOUCH OF EVIL
Written/directed by Orson Welles; re-edited by Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch;
After the triumph of Citizen Kane in
l94l, Orson Welles' career floundered as the former wunderkind morphed
into a perennial Peck's bad boy. The Hollywood establishment found the style and
content of films like The Lady From Shanghai (l948) increasingly
problematic. Welles' imperious and erratic character further compounded his
difficulties with the system. Touch of Evil, written and directed in l958,
was touted as his comeback movie. Supposedly, it would be the first in a five
picture deal with Universal Studios. It's likely that Universal executives assumed
that a chastened Welles would create a routine crime drama with an entertaining
salting of the master's touch. Instead, he delivered a hellish excursion through
a extravagantly decadent Mexican bordertown milieu. Here, indeed, was William
Carlos William's 'ischio-rectal fossa of mankind': a locale foully stained with
lust and greed and racial prejudice, the latter an issue which still lay
uncomfortably outside the provenance of most mainstream Fifties movies. Welles'
telling of his tale was deemed idiosyncratic as its content -- particularly the
rapid crosscutting between parallel plot lines. Welles displayed his typical restlessness upon
a project's completion by immediately flying off to Mexico, where he began to
film Don Quixote (it would never be finished). Behind his back, studio
apparatchiks hastily cut his work to their own meagre measure; shooting new
scenes, clumsily re-editing others. Touch of Evil subsequently opened to
mixed reviews, then quickly vanished. Within a few years, it would be hailed as a
subversive masterpiece. Its substance and style went on to inspire a legion of
directors, from the French New Wave -- notably Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc
Godard -- to American filmmakers as recently as Curtis Hanson (Hanson states
that LA Confidential [l997] was strongly influenced by Touch of Evil).
But Welles himself never directed a Hollywood picture again. His subsequent
tragi-comic journey had him hawking jug wine, booming portentous voiceovers,
acting in often inferior films to cobble together funding for flawed, but
brilliant attempts to rise from his own ashes, e.g., The Trial (l963) and
Chimes at Midnight (l967). Welles did get to view Universal's version of
Touch of Evil prior to its release. He promptly fired off a 58 page memo
to the studio explaining in detail how his central concepts could be restored to
the satisfaction of all concerned. His graceful, well- reasoned pleadings went
utterly unheeded. But the memo survived, as well as pristine prints of Welles'
original footage. Now, using cutting edge technology, a dedicated Universal team
headed by Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch, assisted by Welles scholar Jonathan
Rosenbaum, has re-edited Touch of Evil, following Welles' instructions to
the letter. Forty years after the fact, we can finally see the picture the great
auteur wanted us to see. The mainspring of Welles' screenplay, adapted
from a second string potboiler by Whit Masterson, is the demolition of small
time bigshot Rudy Linnekar and his current bimbo, moments after Linnaker drives
across the border between the seedy Mexican town of Los Robles and its unnamed
American counterpart (the locale Welles used for both was Venice, California, in
its down-and-out pre-hippie days). Touch of Evil's
famous introduction, from the furtive planting of a bomb in Linnekar's car to
its detonation, lasts three minutes and forty seconds. The sequence unspools in
one astonishing take: Welles' mobile camera slithers through streets crooked as
his characters' motivations, effortlessly swooping and diving as it tracks the
doomed couple. Along the way, one glimpses another couple, walking hand in hand:
Mike Vargas, an elite Mexican narcotics cop (Charleton Heston, his familiar
craggy attractiveness rendered obscurely unsettling by swarthy makeup, black
hair and moustache), and his new American bride Suzy (Janet Leigh of the
alarming bosom; cherry-pie fresh, ripe for victimization, Leigh's Suzy uncannily
foreshadows her role as the doomed Marion Crane in Hitchcock's Psycho
(l96O) two years later). The titles which formerly obscured Welles'
magisterial establishing sequence have been removed by the re-edit, so that one
fully savors the first impact of Welles' sleazy, oddly seductive bordertown mise-en-scene.
Henri Mancini's idiomatic score has been carefully pared down, permitting one to
hear the director's signature deployment of cunningly overlapped dialogue and
relevant ambient sound -- e.g, the tinny country music playing on the car radio,
which obscures the bomb's ominous tick-tock. Vargas has just incarcerated a powerful member
of the Grandi crime family in Mexico. In the midst of his honeymoon, he insists
on leaving Suzy to join the investigation into Linnekar's murder on the American
side -- "because it looks bad for us". The naieve Suzy is easily conned into a
meeting with boss Uncle Joe Grandi himself (vintage Hollywood's all-purpose
ethnic, Akim Tamiroff, in an Edward G. Robinson sendup no less menacing for its
patent absurdity). Grandi implies that Vargas' nosing around his family's dirty
business will put her husband and Suzy in harm's way. The implicit racism of her
dismissal -- she calls him a "greasy little man" -- sorts as oddly with her
Mexican marriage as her earlier reference to Uncle Joe's nephew/messenger as "Pancho".
Enter Chief Detective Hank Quinlan (Orson
Welles), an ex-alcoholic, foul-mouthed, unkempt, limping hulk, still haunted by
his wife's violent death long ago. He's become a local celebrity for solving a
string of murders with the help of his devoted sidekick Pete Menzies (Joseph
Calleia's poignant performance as Menzies led one critic to muse that the film's
truest love is that which binds the two cops). Quinlin bristles with suspicion;
growls bigoted barbs at Vargas; then quickly proclaims that the killer is a
frightened young Mexican shoe-clerk who is the lover of Linnekar's daughter. At
the youth's apartment Menzies discovers dynamite in a shoebox; announces proudly
that Quinlan has once again found his man. But minutes before Vargas himself had
discovered the same box, empty. Vargas eventually winkles out the secret of
Quinlan's successes -- vital evidence planted without Menzies's knowledge.
Meanwhile, Suzy is kidnapped by Uncle Joe's hoodlums in a scheme to indite her
as a degenerate addict, and implicate Vargas as a dope dealer. Quinlan strikes a
devil's bargain with Uncle Joe, supposedly in aid of both smashing Vargas. He
then strangles the crime boss in the tawdry motel room where Suzy lies drugged,
to make it appear that Vargas killed Uncle Joe over turf or wife or both.
Quinlan is ultimately unmasked and killed. Vargas and Suzy, still dazed from her
ordeal, are united. The clerk's confession that he did blow up Linneaker is
tossed to the viewer as a troubling afterthought: ironically, Quinlan's original
suspicions on that score were absolutely correct... In their hapless efforts to address what they
saw as a need for greater clarity in Touch of Evil's labybrinthine plot,
Universal's henchmen largely succeeded at unhitching the parallel narrative
streams of Vargas' sleuthing after Quinlan's iniquities, and Suzy's abduction.
As a result, the studio's version registers as more static, and is
frequently confusing. Re-establishing Welles' intricate cross-cuts between the
two story lines accelerates the film's momentum and energizes one's apprehensive
alertness, setting the stage even more adroitly for a climax which is as
extraordinary as the reknowned opening. Welles' finale elegantly reprises the
vertiginous crane and dolly camera movements of Linnekar's murder. Wearing a
wire provided by Vargas, the disillusioned, heartbroken Menzies walks with his
erstwhile mentor through a surreal blasted landscape of oil derricks (similar
locales have backgrounded two subsequent generations of action thrillers).
Vargas desparately stumbles around, behind, and below the pair with an
inadequate receiving device, seeking to capture Quinlan's confession.
The despoiled terrain specifically invokes
Quinlan's befouled moral condition, but also speaks to the general state of
corruption prevailing in Welles' Hobbesian universe, ridden with rapacity and
rancid capitalist greed. Here and elsewhere one is struck by the director's
affinity for the themes and means of early Twentieth century European
Expressionist art (e.g. Grosz, Klimt, Schiele) and cinema (e.g. The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari [l9l9], M [l93l]) . Touch of Evil's subject
matter, its intense chiaroscuro, skewed camera angles, grotesque physical
distortions -- all resonate with the Expressionists' nostalgia for the gutter;
with their sinister insinuations of unruly aggression and transgressive
sexuality (the re-edit undoes the studio's suppression of Welles' clear
inference that Suzy has been raped as well as drugged by Grandi's goons.
An oneiric irrationality, emblematic of much
European Expressionist art and previous Hollywood film noirs (many created by
emigree directors), pervades Touch of Evil. It is, for instance, utterly
absurd that Vargas should pursue racket busting and newly wedded bliss at the
same time, and in the same dangerous milieu. Vargas repeatedly attempts to
rescue Suzy, even as he persistently exposes her to ever more profound
degradation and mortal risk. The logic reconciling such glaring contradictions
resides in the unconscious. It's often revealed in the dreamwork -- which
Touch of Evil evokes more powerfully than any noir effort, before or
since. Freud portrayed the oneiric realm as a kingdom
of misrule where the id threatens to reign supreme, and the unconscious thrives
upon forbidden desire and debauched motivation. In the Freudian andere
lokalitat -- the "other place" -- of Los Robles, Welles strips bare the
heroic Vargas' repressed dark side. It's in this nightmare world where one may
discern Vargas' disavowed violent proclivities, projected upon the unremittingly
evil Grandis; Vargas' consciously disavowed prejudice against Anglos; Vargas'
latent mysogeny and an attendant fear of the feminine redeemed by exuberant rape
fantasies; all fomented by the presence of Suzy -- his delectable, disturbing
exogamous object choice, with her airy, country-club racism. Welles also mocks the irrationality of many a
Hollywood happy ending even while staging one. Mike and Suzy's terminal reunion
is so hectically conjured up as to seduce the viewer into denying the scarifying
traumata visited upon her, which Vargas' patent derelictions have facilitated.
In real life, his wife would probably be plunged into a profound post-traumatic
disorder; and doubtless bear her husband enormous, perhaps unhealable anger.
Touch of Evil's
cast of minor characters is compelling as its leads, including a klatch of
Welles' cronies in trenchant cameos. As Quinlan's past Spanish whorehouse love,
decked out in frightwig and garish makeup, an almost unrecognizeable Marlene
Dietrich deflates Quinlan's beery nostalgia with one of the most famous
anti-romantic ripostes in film history: "You ought to stay away from those candy
bars, honey -- you a mess..."
Quinlan is a mess indeed, perversely splendid
in his utter ruin. One speculates that his creator was no stranger to his
debased anti-hero's struggle between light and dark, order and chaos, rule and
misrule. Welles epitomized that struggle in Touch of Evil's milieu, and
in the literal mortification of his own person. The director bloated his face,
swelled his body into an obese parody of his corpulent, but still handsome self.
Eerily anticipating the gargantuan wreckage of his subsequent decline and fall,
he became what he beheld.