Orson Welles (1958)

Orson Welles’s film maudit is among the ‘Big Screen Classics’ in the current programme at the just re-opened BFI.  They’re showing the 1998 version, re-edited by Walter Murch in an attempt to fulfil the furious demands Welles made in the fifty-eight-page memo that he fired off to Universal in December 1957 after seeing what the studio had done to the film he’d shot.  This crime drama (with a screenplay by Welles based on the 1956 Whit Masterson novel Badge of Evil) is most famous, rightly or wrongly, for its opening three-minute tracking shot and its closing summary of the central character, the unscrupulous police chief Hank Quinlan (Welles), by brothel-keeper-cum-fortune-teller Tanya (Marlene Dietrich):  ‘He was some kind of man … what does it matter what you say about people?’  In the course of the intervening action, there are plenty more remarkable things.

Made in black and white, Touch of Evil is widely regarded as Hollywood’s last great noir.  To this inexpert eye, it certainly looks like the last word in the expressionistic visuals and sense of moral rot associated with the genre.  The cinematographer, Russell Metty, creates some extraordinarily long dark shadows.  Quinlan finally sinks to his death in wastewater strewn with floating garbage.  That bravura opening shot – during which a bomb is planted in the boot of a car that crosses the US-Mexican border before getting blown to pieces – is a taste of things to come.  The editing (Welles originally cut the film with Virgil Vogel and Aaron Stell, though Walter Murch clearly must take a lion’s share of the credit) imparts real tension – a tension reinforced by the urgent rhythm of repeated passages of overlapping dialogue, expertly directed.  Henry Mancini’s music helps too.

About halfway through the tracking shot at the start, two of the three main characters – Mexican Ramon Miguel ‘Mike’ Vargas (Charlton Heston) and his American wife Susie (Janet Leigh) – appear on the scene.  Vargas is a detective, well known locally for bringing drug dealers to justice on the Mexican side of the border.  When the car bomb goes off, he and Susie are on their honeymoon, which is instantly and majorly interrupted.  Charlton Heston, at this distance in time, is a double problem.  His Hispanising hair dye and make-up seem objectionable now, along with the implication that a Mexican can be heroic only if he’s a white man underneath.  (This racist aspect of the film is all the more unfortunate – and ironic – when Quinlan’s racism is part of what makes him a villain.)  In addition, Heston’s strenuous nobility is something of a drag on proceedings.  Janet Leigh is better, even if what happens after Susie, supposedly for her own safety, checks into a remote motel, inevitably evokes Leigh’s character’s fate in a similar refuge a couple of years later.  She eventually gets out of this one alive but Dennis Weaver’s elaborately creepy turn as the motel’s night manager only underlines the Psycho connection.

The casting is nothing if not eclectic.  Reassuring faces familiar from other Welles pictures (Ray Collins, Joseph Cotten) share the screen with a weird and wonderful collection of eccentrics (Akim Tamiroff, Mercedes McCambridge et al) and guest stars (Zsa Zsa Gabor, along with Dietrich).  Joseph Calleia is good as Quinlan’s long-standing sidekick, Pete Menzies.  It may not be the most convincing moment of the story when the scales fall from Menzies’s eyes to expose his boss for the career evidence-planter that he is.  It does, though, make for an exciting climax, as Vargas fits Menzies with a wire and tracks him and Quinlan with a tape-recorder around the film’s electrifyingly depraved locale (described by Peter Wollen, in a Sight & Sound piece used as the BFI programme note, as ‘a world littered with psychopathic youth gangs, sleazy motel rooms, garish strip-joints, seedy border posts, peeling police cells, filthy canals and cheap bars’).

Hank Quinlan is one of Orson Welles’s most memorable incarnations, the actor’s prodigious poundage seeming to express his character’s massive corruption.  There’s still a keen brain inside the dead weight of flesh, though, as Welles’s eyes make clear, whether Quinlan is working out his next malign move or reacting fearfully, when he asks Tanya to tell his future with her tarot pack, to her reply that he has no future.  (This terse pronouncement – she doesn’t even need to look at the cards – has a lot more charge than her concluding ‘some kind of man’ tribute.)   Welles’s line readings are often grimly funny.  There are positive as well as negative reasons why the main man in Touch of Evil isn’t the hero.

18 May 2021