ZapTown

[Correlating with the Indianapolis Museum of Art's 2010 Winter Nights Film Series, ZapTown will be publishing essays each week on the films that will be shown in the series.  The museum will be presenting Touch Of Evil on Friday, January 29, with special guest actor, director, and author Peter Bogdanovich. The show at 7 p.m. - $15 Public/ $10 Members/ $11 students with ID. For a full schedule, visit the IMA's website (http://www.imamuseum.org/toby) or our Lead Story on The Toby (http://www.zaptownmag.com/2009/12/lets-go-out-to-the-movies-the-toby - film schedule is located at the bottom of the article).]

Past Essays on ZapTown:

The Blue Angel
Nashville
Arsenic And Old Lace

There’s a certain temptation to be glib and say they don’t make movies like Touch of Evil anymore, but that’s not entirely accurate. They’ve never really made movies like Touch of Evil, and watching it, especially for first time viewers, the film remains a unique example of what can be done with the thriller genre. Although it is widely considered a classic today, the movie was heavily cut by the studio before being released in theaters in 1958, much to the chagrin of writer-director-costar Orson Welles. The version being screened, and with which contemporary audiences should be familiar, is not the ‘studio cut’, but rather one that has been painstakingly recreated based on available footage, inserts, and Welles’ own impassioned notes to the studio when he originally found out they were going to edit the picture (He wrote a 58-page memo!) Ergo, the movie that exists today is not the movie that lucky theatergoers got to see in 1958—but it’s as close to the movie that they were supposed to see as possible!

The film itself, which Welles originally seems to have hoped would be a comeback picture, was largely ignored by audiences on its initial release—it was apparently paired with a film called The Female Animal, which ran as the Headliner to ‘Evil’s ‘B’ picture, but seems today to be largely forgotten. History is funny, that way. Despite the struggle that Welles went through to bring his vision to the screen, and his frustration with the film business, the work itself is timeless, in the way all good movies are-not in any glib sense, but simply that the story of Welles and Heston’s characters, and their linked fates, seems to grow more, rather than less, relevant as time marches on. Watching the film fifty years later, one can easily play the game of trying to spot its influence on American cinema and directors of all stripes, from Scorsese (The famous opening shot, that begins with a bomb being placed in the trunk of a car, builds and builds in one long, smooth tracking shot as it follows Charleton Heston and Janet Leigh across the border, and culminates in an explosion) to the Coen Brothers (It’s not hard to imagine Coen mainstay Jon Polito as the bewigged and bedevilled Mexican mob boss Grandi, if he were available at the time). Furthermore, the film’s singular mix of black comedy and pathos is undeniably well-managed, with Welles switching between the two moods with ease, often within the same scene, never really letting the audience (conditioned by a multitude of pulp thrillers beforehand), relax. Although Welles had great support in carrying out this balancing act in the form of a terrific score crafted by Henry Mancini, the film’s tension between the ridiculous and the tragic is best personified in the two lead performances, Charlton Heston’s heroic Mexican detective, and his corrupt counterpart from the American side of the border, played by the writer-director himself. Heston glides gracefully from being the butt of a joke to traditional detective heroics with a remarkable, self-deprecating aplomb, and Welles’ own performance as Quinlan, silently raging over his years in the trenches, is fascinating to watch–by the film’s climax he has become both sympathetic and monsterous. Welles had not yet developed the full beard that would define his image in his later years, but he was already a large, bulky man when he made this movie, and he used his weight for maximum effect on screen, looming over his victims like a mountain of a man, with a craggy, worn face that he seems to have lit and shot in the most unflattering angles possible-making himself an effective counterpoint to Heston’s grace and energy.

It is, I hope, not spoiling any of the plot’s twists to describe the climax of this movie in further detail, set as it is against a decaying industrial landscape, with Welles’ detective, bemoaning his bad fortune in life as he passes underneath a towering oil derrick. The derrick, filmed in vivid close-up, looms high above him and his partner as they head to their final destination, remaining still and silent, a symbol of wealth and industry that seems teasingly close and yet eternally remote from Quinlan and his world. These final scenes of Touch of Evil are a masterstroke, in that they manage to provide the thriller with a satisfying ‘happy ending’ while maintaining a sense of cynicism (or perhaps, shattered idealism) about the way the world is. It is telling, of course, that while the film’s conclusion has the hero defeating the villain and being reunited with his loved one, the focus of the director (and by extension, the audience) has moved on by that point to another character, who gives their own, sharply different judgement of what all all the expressions of human indignity and frustration we have been party to might mean.

We are moving further away from the 20^th century every day, but it is because of the ghosts raised in movies such as   that Orson Welles haunts us still. This film is an enduring testament to his power, both as a technical filmmaker, and as a man who understood the strange nooks and crannies that exist inside the human spirit. And more than that, it is a terrific time at the movies. See it if you can.

Further Reading:

Bogdanovich, Peter and Rosenbaum, Jonathan, “This Is Orson Welles” (Da Capo Press, 1998).

Naremore, James, “The Magic World Of Orson Welles” (Southern Methodist University Press, 1989).

Munby, Jonathan, “Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil ( University Of Chicago Press: 1999).

Conrad, Peter, “Orsen Welles: The Stories Of His Life (Faber & Faber: 2004).

Naremore, James, “More Than Night: Film Noir In Its Context” (University of California Press: 2008).

Hirsch, Foster, “The Dark Side Of The Screen: Film Noir (Da Capo Press: 2008).