September 24–October 1, 1998

movie shorts

Touch of Evil

New edits provide insight into Orson Welles' famously murky film classic.

by Cindy Fuchs

		Janet Leigh in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil

Directed by Orson Welles
An October Films release

recommended

"He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?" When I first heard Marlene Dietrich utter these words at the end of Orson Welles' last Hollywood movie, Touch of Evil, I was in graduate school, deep into studying film noir and quite in love with Dietrich. As Tana, the gypsyish ex-lover of corrupt U.S. detective Hank Quinlan (played with a paradoxically generous and grotesque hugeness by Welles), Dietrich embodied only one of many subjective, ambiguous and provocative positions in the movie, as it presents a dizzying series of moral fluctuations and corruptions, abuses of authority and instances of racism, sexism and imperialism. These are hardly the topics usually expected from Hollywood movies, and indeed, it was Welles' determination to fight such reductive expectations, however flawed his means or ends.

Brilliant and difficult, the Touch of Evil I saw in 1982 was the standard version, released in 1958 by Universal Studios as part of a B-picture double bill with something starring Hedy Lamarr. It had been assembled by the studio's in-house editors, who mostly ignored a 58-page memo Welles had written to the studio heads, suggesting ways that they might preserve his original vision for the film. The result received points for ambition and stylishness, but was repeatedly criticized for incoherence. Over the years, critics have cited the studio-edited version of Touch for its complexity and strangeness, its inconsistencies and excesses. It has been called (by Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader, among others) the unofficial endpoint of American film noir. (Dark, deep-focused and morally unresolvable, it does seem an endpoint for something, or rather an opening out into a more delirious, profane and fragmented sensibility than even the classic noir directors imagined.)

As well, Touch has been called an example of the ways that artists are beaten down by an onerous commercial production system, and it might be argued that Welles never recovered from the ordeal of making it. That Touch of Evil turned out to be the last (and only the eighth) Hollywood movie by the once-revered genius behind 1941's Citizen Kane is only one of the many legendary problems and ironies associated with the project.

Now Universal is releasing a Touch that has been re-edited by Walter Murch (prize-winning editor and sound-mixer for The English Patient) and Rick Schmidlen. This version adheres closely to Welles' memo (recently "rediscovered"), trimming footage that had been added by the studio; removing the credits and music track imposed on the famous three minutes-plus opening shot; rearranging several shot sequences, and re-mixing the sound. All of these changes sharpen the story line, make more coherent connections between scenes, and balance treatments of the major characters and themes.

Above all, the re-edit illuminates and extends Tana's incisive last-scene commentary: while it may not matter what you say about people, it matters tremendously how and why you say it. More importantly, perhaps, is the way that the film holds up, as its investigations of ethical obscurities and legal parsings seem almost absurdly relevant to current events. No doubt, this improved Touch of Evil remains a demanding film. It offers no easy answers to its moral and legal dilemmas. Reportedly, Welles was once asked the meaning of his title, and he said he had no idea. Whatever the precise circumstances of this exchange, the general situation isn't hard to imagine, given that Welles had a famously strained relationship with the project and renowned lack of patience for obtuse interlocutors. When Touch was released in 1958, he had already put some distance between himself and the film, and had moved on to work in Europe (at least until he made those embarrassing "We will sell no wine before its time" commercials).

Whatever Welles did or didn't have in mind, we might interpret the title in various contexts. It shifts the focus of Whit Masterson's novel, Badge of Evil, from a cop's corruption to a broken, brilliant cop meeting the squalor of the world he perceives with his own. It suggests the many ways that characters and places are indeed touched by evil. Amorphous and ugly, this evil is insinuated by the film's stunning visual compositions and cuts (skewed angles, wide angles, proto-MTV speed and saturation: Hype Williams has nothing on Welles' delight in assaulting his audience) and spelled out by the dialogue and plot. The first shot sets up the film's restlessness and audaciousness. The camera initially spots a bomb being planted in a car trunk, then follows the car's crossing from a tawdry Mexican town (Los Robles) to an equally creepy Texan nowhere, and at last captures the bomb's fiery explosion, interrupting the protagonist couple's loving embrace as they stand nearby.

This couple is the Mexican lawman Vargas (Charlton Heston in dark makeup, an exoticizing mustache and shiny black hair) and his new American wife Suzie (Janet Leigh in an amazing bullet-bra, accentuated by a series of pin-up sweaters and lacy slips). Their interracial relationship epitomizes the film's general concern with border-crossing and more particular interest in racism and fear of misogyny (two other interracial couples figure prominently, including the one blown up in the car, a U.S. contractor and Mexican stripper, and then the contractor's daughter and her Mexican shoe clerk lover, Sanchez).

Significantly, none of the characters are untouched by the evil of racism, whether as victims or perpetrators. Antagonized early in the film by a young Mexican punk in a leather jacket, Suzie puts him off by calling him "Pancho," a slur that the kid and his gangster-mentor Uncle Joe Grandi (the superb Akim Tamiroff, who keeps losing his hairpiece at crucial moments) take very personally. The scene showing their confrontation is as outlandish as any other in the film, with close-ups showing Joe's bulging eyes and Suzie's simultaneous fear and arrogance, a background mirror that alternately separates and affiliates the threesome (the punk lurking silently at the edges of the scene), and the empty street seen through the storefront window, looking forward to Suzie's isolation once her husband leaves her to pursue the car-bomb case.

The two stories — Suzie's and Vargas' — take place in separate spaces. Suzie is horribly harassed by Grandi's gang in a remote U.S. motel (ironically, she believes she'll be safe in her own country), drugged, and framed for murder: watch for Mercedes McCambridge as the "mannish" gang-girl who taunts her with threats of "the Maryjane" and asks to watch the sexual assault, and Dennis Weaver as the eerie and broadly comic motel nightman (Welles likened this character to a "Shakespearean fool"). That Suzie's unspeakable violations are eventually retracted by the film (in a denouement that is both convenient and crazy) indicates Welles' disdain for Hollywood formulas more than his adherence to them.

Meanwhile, Vargas is allied in his investigation with Quinlan, once a respected detective, now an overweight and miserable alcoholic. Between them, they represent more of the film's thematic concern with transgressions across borders literal and metaphorical, between Mexico and the United States, justice and vengeance, old and new schools. Quinlan is at first unconditionally supported by his partner Menzies (Joseph Calleia), for whom he long ago "took a bullet." Now, however, Menzies is increasingly troubled by his idol's erratic behavior, and tempted by Vargas' suggestions that he's planting evidence.

The film's many turns eventually lead to a head-on crash between old man Quinlan (whose repeatedly lost cane indicates the loss of more than his manhood) and younger, stiffer man Vargas (Heston has likely never been more unbelievable in a part: he took it just after completing The Ten Commandments and he brought his Hollywood clout to bear in lobbying for Welles as the film's director). The showdown involves newfangled and exceedingly awkward technology (a tape recorder which Vargas uses to get Quinlan's confession and clear his wife's name).

Quinlan's tragedy looms very large, as Welles exaggerates his own enormous frame in many disturbing low-angle shots. Betraying his own code of honor, his partner and the law he purports to uphold, Quinlan is finally not so much wrong as he is pained, confused and caught. He is, of course, a potential fascist, too sure that he's right, but he's not so unsympathetic as you might expect. Thankfully, this and other facets of Welles' unconventional thinking are now a little clearer for the rest of us.