Touch of Evil Movie

This baroque nightmare of a south-of-the-border mystery is considered to be one of the great movies of Orson Welles, who both directed and starred in it. On honeymoon with his new bride, Susan (Janet Leigh), Mexican-born policeman Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) agrees to investigate a bomb explosion. In so doing, he incurs the wrath of local police chief Hank Quinlan (Welles), a corrupt, bullying behemoth with a perfect arrest record. Vargas suspects that Quinlan has planted evidence to win his past convictions, and he isn't about to let the suspect in the current case be railroaded. Quinlan, whose obsession with his own brand of justice is motivated by the long-ago murder of his wife, is equally determined to get Vargas out of his hair, and he makes a deal with local crime boss Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) to frame Susan on a drug rap, leading to one of the movie's many truly harrowing sequences. Touch of Evil dissects the nature of good and evil in a hallucinatory, nightmarish ambience, helped by the shadow-laden cinematography of Russell Metty and by the cast, which, along with Tamiroff and Welles includes Charlton Heston as a Mexican; Marlene Dietrich, in a brunette wig, as a brittle madam who delivers the movie's unforgettable closing words; Mercedes McCambridge as a junkie; and Dennis Weaver as a tremulous motel clerk. Touch of Evil has been released with four different running times -- 95 minutes for the 1958 original, which was taken away from Welles and brutally cut by the studio; 108 minutes and 114 minutes in later versions; and 111 minutes in the 1998 restoration. Based on a 58-page memo written by Welles after he was barred from the editing room during the film's original post-production, this restoration, among numerous other changes, removed the opening titles and Henry Mancini's music from the opening crane shot, which in either version ranks as one of the most remarkably extended long takes in movie history.

After the commercial disappointment and political controversy of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles was never given another opportunity to make a film with an entirely free hand in the United States. Touch of Evil was as close as he came (producer Albert Zugsmith has said he gave Welles no interference, but that the upper management at Universal insisted on re-editing the film against his wishes), but while Welles was often regarded as a director too much in love with "art" to make a strictly commercial film, Touch of Evil proved he could have it both ways -- it's a strikingly constructed, visually audacious film that's also a great piece of popcorn entertainment. The justifiably famous opening shot -- a long tracking sequence that opens with a man planting a bomb in a car and ends with a newlywed Mexican DEA agent (Charlton Heston) and his bride (Janet Leigh) crossing the border -- is only the most spectacular bit of visual stunt work in this film; Welles seems to have having a grand time with his camera, and in its way this picture is just as visually exciting and inventive as Citizen Kane. If the story is only one or two steps up from a standard detective potboiler, it's told with enough enthusiasm and tongue-in-cheek wit that one can read it as a parody or a straight neo-noir drama, and it works either way. Also, Welles always had a gift with actors, which certainly didn't fail him here. If Charlton Heston never seems convincing as a Mexican, his straight-arrow strength and thirst for justice certainly suit the role, while Janet Leigh is a virtuously sexy new bride, and Welles himself is superb as the bloated Hank Quinlan, who seems to be collapsing under the weight of his own corruption. (Welles also brought in a distinguished supporting cast, and Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, Marlene Dietrich, and Mercedes McCambridge all deliver performances as memorable as the leads.) If Touch of Evil doesn't have the same ambitious sweep of Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons, that's probably because it was never meant to have it; this film is the work of a great artist having a lot of fun telling a good yarn, and it's wildly entertaining while still delivering the kind of excitement that only a real artist can deliver.