Belgian movie poster to "Touch of Evil"

Touch of Evil was panned by domestic critics upon its U.S. release (as were many of Welles’ films), and played the bottom half of double bills.  But it was voted best film at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair Film Festival.  It should be noted that famed French New Wave pioneers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut sat on that Brussels jury.  New Wave directors and critics have long since idolized the work of Orson Welles.  They felt he was one of the few Hollywood directors who rightly deserved the tag “auteur”, and all the lofty sentiments that the designation implied.  Here’s why.

Touch of Evil is a wildly expressionistic film, displaying the unique baroque stylization that marked all of Welles’ work.  In fact, this film can be seen as the summation of late classic noir’s exaggerated expressionistic tendencies.  By 1950, halfway through the cycle, noir moved into its most self-reflexive and experimental phase.  Touch of Evil is the perfect example of this phenomenon.  The film is full of canted angles, abrupt editing schemes, sweeping camera movements, and the typical Wellesian aural montages.  In the films of Orson Welles, characters often speak in elaborate crosstalk, their voices overlapping and cutting in and out of each other’s statements.  Music functions in much the same way in a Welles film, becoming a sonic tapestry of conflicting patterns and rhythms.  And then, there are the shadows.

Ramon Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) is disgusted when Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) discovers the dynamite he used to frame the boy

Like all noirs, Touch of Evil takes place in a dark and violent world full of pools of shadows that envelop characters and settings.  Welles’ use of shadows is extremely aggressive in this movie.  They dance off of walls, spill into streets, and create doppelgangers that stalk characters mercilessly.  Consider the opening of the film, in which a bomb is planted in a car trunk.  The bomber runs offscreen towards his target at first, and only his shadow is left in our view to scuttle along the wall as the camera tracks towards his destination.  The effect is not unlike a character losing himself in the dark half of his personality, which is a central theme in noir.  In Touch of Evil, shadows as doppelgangers reign supreme.  A character is never without his dark counterpart, either looming over him, obscuring another character, or chasing after him when he attempts to exit the frame.  Welles’ message: the only thing you can’t run from is yourself.  The same shadowy effect produced from the opening double murder scene is mirrored a few scenes later, when Mexican cop Mike Vargas (played by a heavily made-up Charlton Heston) is targeted by a would-be assassin with a bottle of acid.  As the assassin tracks Vargas, who’s walking along an outdoor wall, we lose sight of him and he becomes a fleeting shadow that rushes across Vargas’ body (the camera also mirrors its earlier movements as it tracks relentlessly towards the confrontation).  The unique choreography that Welles orchestrates between bodies in motion, shadows, and the environments in which they interact is quite spellbinding.

Portrait of actress Marlene Dietrich, who played Tanya in "Touch of Evil"

This film is full of star cameos, some done as personal favors to the director.  They include Joseph Cotton, Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Dennis Weaver, and Mercedes McCambridge.  Of course, the film also features Welles himself as the crooked American police captain Hank Quinlan, Janet Leigh playing Heston’s American wife Susie Vargas, Joseph Calleia as Quinlan’s fiercely devoted partner Pete Menzies, and Akim Tamiroff as the diminutive gangster Uncle Joe Grandi.  All of Welles’ films border on the theatrical.  This is due not only to the overstated nature of many of them, but also due to the virtuosic performances he was able to coax out of his players.  None more so than Welles himself, who is featured in this film wearing a ton of make-up and prosthetics designed to make him look larger-than-life, literally.  Welles’ transformative performance as Quinlan is the stuff of perfection, as are many of his other famous scene-stealing roles.  He might possibly be the greatest actor-director that has ever lived.

Note the elaborate tracking crane shot that opens the film.  It lasts over four minutes, and is one of the longest, most complex, and most famous shots ever recorded.  It is the very reason that Welles himself wanted no opening credits in this film, only closing ones.  Note the classic noir device of utilizing pulsating lights to evoke a murder or a murderer.  The pulsating noir lights first appear in the scene where we are introduced to Uncle Joe Grandi.  They effectively foreshadow his gruesome death, which is rendered in wildly flashing and unstable lighting schemes.  Note the very moment after Grandi’s murder at the hands of Quinlan, in which we follow Quinlan out the door before the camera rests in a close-up freeze frame of a sign by the door that reads, “Stop.  Forget Anything?”  Of course, Quinlan does forget something.  His trusty cane.  This becomes the definitive piece of evidence that brings about his downfall.  Ironic that it’s a cane, a supportive device that is meant to hold one up.

Quinlan (Orson Welles) falls backwards into the muddy river, adrift with the other trash and unwanted debris.

Portentous foreshadowing and recapitulative echoing permeate this film.  Note that when Vargas is attacked with that bottle of acid, it falls onto the wall next to him and dissolves a burlesque poster instead.  Who’s poster?  A dancer named Zita, one of the occupants who was killed in the opening car bomb explosion.  Pay special attention to the conclusion of the film.  They don’t get any better.  Quinlan foreshadows his partner Menzies’ death by referring to his good-naturedness as “angelic”.  He tells him that he’s wearing a halo, and to be careful because soon he’ll be flapping his wings too.  He says this playfully of course, but this playful remark becomes all too real only a few moments later.  An agitated Quinlan shoots Menzies with Vargas’ gun.  As Menzies crumples to the ground, he leaves traces of blood on Quinlan’s hand.  Traces that Quinlan hurriedly attempts to erase, as he literally tries to wash his hands of the matter in a dirty river underneath the bridge they were standing on.  But his attempts are unsuccessful, as Menzies ends up living long enough to shoot him in the back.  As Quinlan looks up at Menzies’ body on the bridge above him, more blood drips down and lands on his hands again.  Thus, his efforts are pointless.  He’s a killer.  A marked man.  He’s doomed, as Tana (played by Marlene Dietrich) tells him earlier in the film when she says, “Your future is all used up.”  Quinlan then falls backwards into the muddy river, adrift with the other trash and unwanted debris.

This profound conclusion features line after line of amazing noir quotes that can stand proudly alongside such famous closing remarks as those of The Maltese Falcon and Sunset Boulevard.  Welles’ brilliance as a writer is unquestioned.  As Tana stands passively and watches Quinlan float away, she replies to the assistant D.A.’s question about having any final words for Quinlan with a cynical and hopeless, “He was some kind of a man…what does it matter what you say about people?”  The somber and existential themes behind this final sentiment are the very ethos of noir.  She then turns to walk off into the all-encompassing shadows, only turning around momentarily to offer us a brief, “Adios.”  It’s a powerful and beautiful ending, easily among noir’s finest, and enough to send an appreciative chill down your spine time and time again.

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