Touch of Evil
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"Before leaving Hollywood for good, legendary auteur Orson Welles made this masterpiece of late film noir. A sordid, sweaty, and devilishly styled affair about U.S. and Mexican relations, Touch of Evil stars Welles himself, alongside Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh."
— MUBI's take
Touch of Evil
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1993.
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Touch of Evil is a 1958 American film noir written and directed by Orson Welles, who also stars in the film. The screenplay was loosely based on the contemporary Whit Masterson novel Badge of Evil (1956). The cast included Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, and Marlene Dietrich.
Why It Rocks
- The shadow-drenched cinematography of Russell Metty is remarkable and stands out right from the film's opening shot from high above in one long extended take. Namely, the film opens with a traveling shot that starts at the level of the belt-buckle and then swings left and right and up, as a quick and shadowy figure sets a time bomb and places the device in the trunk of a car. Continuing in one unbroken shot, the camera pulls away into a panoramic view of the border town of Los Robles, then floats down to follow Mr. and Mrs. Vargas as they prepare to cross from his country to hers on foot. The Vargases reach the checkpoint just as the millionaire and the blonde in the car do — and the blonde complains about having the ticking noise in her head. The Vargases kiss. Within that single opening shot alone, Welles nails down the movie’s mood, setting, plot, and even its racial friction. (The shot clocks in at three minutes and twenty seconds.)
- Another grand example of the great camera work coming to new heights is the climatic bugging of Captain Quinlan.
- Incredible acting from just about the entire cast:
- Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh are stunning as a determined Mexican prosecutor and his new American wife
- Akim Tamiroff and Orson Welles himself are both surprisingly very charismatic as the antagonists Grandi, a crime boss and Quinlan, a tainted American police captain. Quinlan proved to be one of Welles' signature roles as an actor and persona: the archetype of the big man whose own excesses help bring him to his knees.
- A lot of Welles' old collegaues such as Ray Collins, Tamiroff, and Marlene Dietrich and seasoned Hollywood hands like Joseph Calleia were melded into a melodramatis personae vivid enough to anchor a gutter-baroque extravaganza.
- Amazing score by Henry Mancini that added to the surface excitement while diluting the atmosphere to be dense and unruly.
- The major characters of the film are very complex and often strange, and help showcase just how sleazy the town is.
- Captain Hank Quinlan is an obsessive and bloated police captain with an adoring henchman, an instinct for finding culprits, and a penchant for framing them. He's also a tragic figure in this take who has a "touch of evil" in his enforcement of the law.
- There's also a nervous and sex-crazed motel manager, or "the night man" (given to Dennis Weaver) that was added to the story, a blind shopkeeper, a drug smuggler (Manolo Sanchez), Uncle Joe Grandi -- who's a sweaty drug dealer with a poorly-fitting wig, a terrorizing gang of juvenile delinquents
- ...and then there's Ramon Miguel "Mike" Vargas who's an international narcotics officer who is honeymooning, but ignores his wife Susan.
- As both the director and the writer, Orson Welles revamped the script, which was based on a serviceable policier called Badge of Evil.
- Mike Vargas had has ethnic identity changed
- Tana (played by Marlene Dietrich) and one of the gang members (played by Mercedes McCambridge) had their roles beefed up
- He made anti-Mexican racism a key issue, told the story from three different points of view, and as previously mentioned, brought a tragic dimension to Quinlan. Welles' original storyline was about the testing of a honeymoon couple by a violent incident that engages the man’s professional conscience and subjects the wife to a series of indignities which irritate and bewilder her and which her husband fails to completely appreciate.
- Reversing the racial makeup of two key characters, Welles turned the putative hero Mr. Vargas into a Mexican supernarc and his new wife into a spunky Anglo from Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.
- At the time it was one of the freest, riskiest, and raciest melodramas ever financed by a Hollywood studio due to affronting respectable 1950's sensibilities, with controversial themes including racism, betrayal of friends, sexual ambiguity, frameups, drugs, and police corruption of power. And it was all done within a 24-hour period.
- At the same time, the film can also be seen as a deconstruction of film noir -- right around the end of the genre's era
- Prior noirs had suggested that the police wasn't as honorable as they seem, and it's put to full display here. From the very beginning, the lawmen from both sides of the border are uninterested in the car bombing for its own sake, and more concerned with how the event could be used to advance personal or political agendas. Hank Quinlan in particular makes sweeping judgements about how the crime was carried out, without even examining the crime scene. Even the film itself is only interested in the bombing as a device to set up the conflict between Vargas and Quinlan —their conflict dominates the final act, while the bombing case gets wrapped up off-screen via a few passing lines of dialogue.
- Detective Hank Quinlan is also a dark look at police work, showing how a life of crime-fighting has disillusioned and embittered him to the point that he became worse than the criminals he hunted down, and absolutely dismissive and snide to the idealistic Vargas. Vargas himself is not happy about some of the measures he has to take to bring down Quinlan, nor the fact that his dedication to his work keeps him away from his wife. As Vargas himself notes, honest policework is never intended to be an easy or safe job.
Bad Qualities
- While the film carried more heft than its competition at the time, it was clearly an attempt to cash in by someone with a dim grasp of the market. Despite all of the cameos and in-jokes, and moments where Welles unleashed his formidable film-making skills, Welles was pretty much toying with the genre
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