Touch of Evil (1958)

Touch of Evil is an American thriller film first released in 1958, directed by Orson Welles.  The film is based on a novel by Whit Masterson and stars Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, Joseph Calleia and Akim Tamiroff.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Miguel Vargas, a Mexican drugs enforcement official, is on his honeymoon when a car is blown up right in front of his eyes, shortly after crossing the border from Mexico into the United States.   Aware of the political ramifications, Vargas occupies himself in the ensuing investigation, but soon runs up against a distinguished American police chief, Captain Hank Quinlan.  The prime suspect is Sanchez, a Mexican who is married to the daughter of the man who was killed in the explosion.  After subjecting Sanchez to a brutal interrogation in his apartment, Quinlan discovers two sticks of dynamite which leave no doubt as to the Mexican’s guilt.  Vargas is convinced that Quinlan planted the dynamite to ensure a swift conviction and begins his own investigation into the cop’s previous cases.  Realising the threat that Vargas poses, Quinlan conceives an elaborate plan to have him discredited...

Were it not for Citizen Kane (1941), arguably the greatest thing to come out of an American film studio, Touch of Evil would surely rate as Orson Welles’s most inspired film, a thoroughly chilling portrayal of police corruption and personal revenge that encompasses the visceral, the seedy and the darkly surreal within the oppressive confines of its warped and unutterably creepy noir dreamscape.  The last of the classic American films noirs is also one of the best, beginning with what is probably the most imaginative and daring opening to any film - a three minute crane tracking shot in which the camera follows a car which is destined to explode across the Mexican-United States border, a potent metaphor for the personal journey which the film’s two opposing protagonists (a narcotics agent and corrupt cop) will make in the course of the film, from morose twilight into abject darkness.

Touch of Evil is easily Welles’s most unsettling film, as twisted and unpredictable as the characters it portrays, more weird and eerily stylised than his distinctive Macbeth (1948), his previous Hollywood offering.  Assisted by his talented cinematographer Russell Metty, Welles takes all the familiar film noir motifs and blows them up to nightmarish proportions, the result being a bold visual fantasy that is indistinguishable from a dream.  Extreme camera positioning (particularly the excessive use of low shots) heighten the sense of the bizarre and the unreal, transforming the villains of the piece into dangerous weirdos and insuperable grotesques.  Welles, now a corpulent Behemoth that dominates every scene, assumes an almost godlike bearing - untouchable, omnipotent - as the totally unscrupulous police chief Quinlan.  How well he resembles something foul from a children’s fairytale, a wreck of a man eaten away by ambition and resentment so that he is now nothing more than a toad-faced troll skulking in the darkness, wreaking of evil, soaking up the goodness from the world like a sponge of pure malignancy.   How much of Quinlan is Welles himself, the misunderstood genius who made such an impact on 20th century cinema but who found it so hard to make films in his native America?  How tragic and yet how fitting that Touch of Evil would be Welles’s last film to be shot for an American film studio. 

Welles’s is not the only memorable performance the film offers.  Charlton Heston is surprisingly effective as the morally ambiguous narcotics officer, not a clear-cut heroic sort of the kind the actor is best known for portraying, but a far more complex and mysterious individual who feels just at home in the murky world of crime and law-bending as Welles’s noxious character.  It is the interplay between these two unfathomable custodians of right and wrong which provides the film with its central dynamic and allows Welles to construct one of the most brilliant denouements to any of his films.   Janet Leigh is the only thing that looks even remotely human in this film, a fragile stray sheep lost in a world of ugly macho nastiness, haplessly rehearsing the part she would later play in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), complete with sinister motel owner (Dennis Weaver at his most unhinged).  The film’s exotic weirdness is magnificently crowned by an inspired cameo appearance from Marlene Dietrich, revelling in the part of the gypsy fortune teller (a Mexican who speaks with a German accent) - she says far more than she knows when she tells Welles that he has no future.

As happened too often in his filmmaking career, Welles’s original conception for the film was badly compromised by the studio (this time Universal) after he completed filming.  Universal were unhappy with the director’s rough cut and sanctioned a re-edit, with additional scenes added (directed not by Welles but by Harry Keller).  This original release of Touch of Evil proved to be a critical success in Europe but was not well-received in the United States, where it was issued as a B-movie to a lesser film titled The Female Animal (1958).  Understandably, Welles was unhappy with this release and drafted a 58-page memo in which he suggested changes that would improve the film.  Needless to say, the executives at Universal ignored Welles’s memo, although it was used to produce the re-cut of the film which was released in 1998.  This version of Touch of Evil surpasses both the original release and a subsequently rediscovered preview version, released in 1978.  Whilst it may fall somewhat short of its director’s vision, it sits comfortably alongside his other cinematic masterpieces, excelling not only in its sheer visual artistry but also in its chillingly perceptive understanding of the human psyche.  Classic film noir could not have hoped for a finer postscript than this.

© James Travers 2011

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