Articles Touch of Evil

Below Touch of Evil (1958)

MY NOIR:

Touch of Evil

By Jamie Graham
Keywords: Keywords: film noir,
Touch of Evil, Orson Welles,
Charlton Heston, Badge of Evil,
restoration

I was 19 the first time I saw Touch of Evil (1958). It

was the third term of my first year at university,
June 1992, and my cinephile room-mate had taken
it upon himself to broaden my filmic horizons.
(Personally I thought I was doing just fine, none of
my friends possessed such an eclectic video collection ranging from Ghost (1990) to Pet Sematary
(1989) to Rocky IV (1985).)

Back then I had no idea that Touch of Evil marked

the close of the golden age of film noir (194158);
hell, I dont think Id even heard of film noir, and
certainly I didnt know what it meant or represented, its visual tics and thematic tropes. All I
knew for sure was that the black-and-white whodunit playing out before my bulging eyes was the
sweatiest, sleaziest movie Id ever seen.
It wasnt so much the labyrinthine plot, involving
a car bomb, a drug lord, police corruption, racial
prejudice and a battle of monstrous wills between
Charlton Hestons Mexican (!) narcotics officer and
Orson Welless 330lb US sheriff. And it wasnt the
seedy border-town setting of Los Robles (actually
Venice Beach, California), with its bars, motels and
strip joints. No, it was the cluttered compositions,
see-sawing angles, forced perspectives, sinuous
tracking shots, voracious shadows and ambient
sound design. I could smell the dust and lust.

Articles Touch of Evil

Touch of Evil opens, influentially, with a tracking shot lasting 3 minutes and 20 seconds. The
camera spies a ticking bomb ensconced in the
trunk of a car, before craning up over rooftops to
follow the vehicle as it crawls through the fetid,
teeming town. It then swoops down to eye-level to
track a pair of newly-weds, Mike and Susan Vargas
(Heston and Janet Leigh), as they stroll towards a
border checkpoint where theyre joined by the
car. Boom!
Enter Hank Quinlan (Welles), a mountainous,
gelatinous cop with a legendary ability to solve
cases aided by his propensity to plant evidence.
Vargas suspects Quinlan is bent and muscles into
the investigation to expose him; Quinlan retaliates
by seeking to frame Vargas and his shiny new wife
on drug and murder charges.
Not that Welles was especially interested in the
plot. No doubt aware that noirs famously tangled storylines had already tied themselves into
knots (not even the author of 1946s The Big Sleeps
source novel, Raymond Chandler, knew which of
the characters killed the chauffeur, while Jacques
Tourneurs Out of the Past (1947) contained so many
twists it threatened to collapse in on itself), he
chose form over content.
It had been Hestons idea that Welles direct (Universal allowed him to take the job if he agreed

26 | film international issue 65

Below Touch of Evil (1958)

to do it for his actors fee, i.e. for nothing), and

the maverick film-maker immediately rewrote
the script. The story was sidelined, and Welles
neglected to even read the pulp novel it was based
on, Badge of Evil.
The film that emerged was so down and dirty it
effectively concluded the first chapter of noir. Just
compare it to the movie that many consider to be
the first word, The Maltese Falcon (1941). For all its
greed, violence, fatalism and rapacious, convoluted
plotting, John Hustons movie featured a magnetic
anti-hero, gumshoe Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart),
who betters the baddies and restores some sort of
moral order come the closing credits. Whats more,
Huston shoots at eye-level and uses low-contrast
lighting, techniques favoured by classical cinema.
Touch of Evil, on the other hand, boasts a morally
repugnant protagonist in the oversized form of
Quinlan, and ends with an ugly irony as it transpires that the innocent victim he framed is, in
fact, guilty. Even the upstanding Vargas is tainted
as he obsessively pursues Quinlan and puts his
wife in danger in the process. The lighting is high
contrast, the angles extreme.
Paul Schrader declared Welless picture film
noirs epitaph, though I didnt know this when I
first watched it in 1992. All I knew for sure was that
I needed a shower.

Articles Touch of Evil

I could smell the dust and

lust.
Fast forward to 1998 and Touch of Evil was recut
and restored by Universal, under the supervision of
ace editor and sound designer Walter Murch (The
Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979)). For the
original 1958 release, the studio had cut Welless
vision down and the 93 minutes that remained
featured new scenes shot by Harry Keller (to add
insult to injury, it was shoved out as the B-feature
on a double bill topped by The Female Animal, starring Hedy Lamarr and directed by you guessed it
Keller). A more complete version had surfaced in
1976, totalling 108 minutes, but Murch now worked
from a 58-page memo Welles had fired off to Universals head of production, Edward Muhl, upon
seeing the 93-minute cut.
The restoration was 111 minutes long and put
Welless subtle sound and editing choices into
painstaking effect, while also reintroducing the
directors desired cross-cutting between the Quinlan/Vargas story and a subplot involving the terrorizing of Janet Leigh. Best of all, it removed both
the credits and Henry Mancinis title theme from
that stunning opening shot, allowing it to unfurl in
gleaming purity.

Below Touch of Evil (1958)

By the time of this 1998 release, Id been a film

journalist for two years and was aware of Touch of
Evils backstory, so I knew just how special it was
to now be able to scrutinize every shadow of the
films fluent opening, to hear music crackling from
car radios and spilling out of smoke-filled bars. Id
also by now seen enough of Welless work, both
as director and actor, to see the patterns at play:
Quinlan was another of his hubristic characters
la Charles Foster Kane, Macbeth, Othello and
Harry Lime, and Quinlans fate, like Kanes, would
strangely echo Welless own.
Touch of Evil, after all, turned out to be the filmmakers last studio film, with the remainder of
his scrappy career spent wandering Europe from
project to project, most of them abandoned. Your
futures all used up, Marlene Dietrichs gypsy prostitute tells Quinlan, a sloppy, immoderate, egotistical man who tries desperately but futilely to exert
control on all about him. A metaphor for Welles
himself in Hollywood?
Franois Truffaut, then a critic, certainly saw
Quinlan as Welless alter ego, and the film as autobiography. He wrote: A capricious genius, Welles
[] seems to be clearly telling us: Im sorry Im so
slovenly; its not my fault if Im a genius; Im dying:
love me
Perhaps this, too, is why Welless dazzling direction clamours for attention? It certainly made my
19-year-old self sit up and take notice as I watched
it on a 14-inch TV in a hall of residence with my
film-buff mate. Along with Bergmans Persona
(1966), Buuels That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
and Allens Manhattan (1979), Touch of Evil is the
film that first made me ponder a career in film
journalism. Who knows, perhaps one day I could
even write about it
And if not, there was always Rocky IV.
Contributors details
Jamie Graham is Deputy Editor of Total Film
magazine and has written for The Sunday
Times, The Telegraph and Sight and Sound.

www.filmint.nu | 27

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