Saturday
14Jun2008
'Touch of Evil': 50 Years Later
Saturday, June 14, 2008 at 6:06PM 
It has been half a century since
Touch of Evil made a small ripple as a seedy little crime movie, but since then, that ripple has become a tidal wave of appreciation for not just the film but also its director,
Orson Welles.
Welles could never live up to
Citizen Kane, his debut made as a 25-year-old maverick that would eventually be remembered by most critics as the greatest, most influential film of all time. It's doubtful that any director could match Kane, regardless of whether or not it was their first film. Welles had other obstacles, however.
He struggled both in and out of Hollywood for years trying to make one movie after another until 1957: First came the stolen ambition of his
Kane follow-up,
The Magnificent Ambersons, which was
notoriously re-edited by RKO. Then came an uncredited stewardship of the
forgettable
Journey Into Fear and the mostly average spy
caper,
The Stranger.
The Lady From Shanghai, a bizarre noir was his
next film as a director, followed by a low-budget
Macbeth. Before landing at Universal for
Touch of Evil, Welles also made a film called Confidential Report, or
Mr. Arkadin. Fans love it. Nobody else has ever
seen it.
Welles recalled the unusual circumstances which lead to his involvement with Touch of Evil in an interview with director
Peter Bogdanovich for the book, This is Orson Welles.
"I had just acted in the Jeff Chandler Western for Universal (Man in the Shadow), and they sent me another script -- a very bad one that took place in San Diego, with a crooked detective in it. And they said, 'Do you want to play it?' I said, 'maybe,' and I was still wondering whether I could afford not to make it when they called up Chuck Heston and said, 'Here’s a script -- we’d like you to read it. We have Welles.' And he misunderstood them and said, 'Well, any picture that Welles directs, I’ll make.' So they got back on the phone quick and said to me, “Do you want to direct it?' and I said, 'Yes, if I can rewrite it.' Well, they said they’d let me do that if I wouldn’t get paid as a director or a writer -- just my original salary as an actor. So I had about three and a half weeks to go before it began, and I locked myself up with four secretaries and wrote an entirely new story and script."Based loosely on the Whit Masterson novel, Badge of Evil, Touch of Evil showed the undoing of a corrupt policeman of a Mexican border town. Comeuppance of the rich and powerful had always been a thematic element of Welles’ films (think of George Minafer Amberson’s just desserts or the fate of Charles Foster Kane); however, in Touch of Evil, the betrayal suffered by the powerful Captain Hank Quinlan was not as a result of a changing society - at least, not primarily - but rather at the hands of his close associate, Pete Menzies. This sort of personal betrayal was evidenced again with brutal emotional bareness in Welles’ Chimes at Midnight. That theme so common in Welles’ films was mirrored eerily by his own personal and professional life. In the 44 years of his life following Citizen Kane, Welles would never again approach the acclaim or attract the attention he did with his film debut. Instead, his career was an uncanny exhibition of missed opportunities and commercial failures. His own comeuppance came over the course of 40 years, a period during which Welles, regarded as one of the greatest of all film directors, could only navigate twelve films to completion, leaving about that many in bits and pieces along the way. In many ways, and to a lot of people, Touch of Evil would be Welles' last hurrah. As for betrayal, it has been suggested that Welles wrought his abandonment by John Houseman, his closest associate through Citizen Kane, and by virtually every studio he ever worked for. Perhaps out of bitterness over what he perceived as disloyalty throughout his career, Welles began to focus on the subject of a once-mighty figure betrayed by a close associate in his films with The Lady from Shanghai, and that thread remained constant through even his multilayered documentary of art forger Elmyr de Hory in F for Fake. In Touch of Evil, Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia) betrayed crooked cop Hank Quinlan (Welles) after decades of looking the other way while Quinlan framed suspects in the name of justice. "The surface themes of Touch of Evil are easy to spot, remarked Roger Ebert, "and the clash between the national cultures gets an ironic flip: Vargas reflects gringo stereotypes while Quinlan embodies cliches about Mexican lawmen. But there may be another theme lurking beneath the surface."
"I was so heartbroken when it turned out I couldn’t go on with it. I was so sure I was going to go on making a lot of pictures at Universal, when suddenly I was fired from the lot. A terribly traumatic experience. Because I was so sure. They went out of their way to compliment me every night of the rushes, and 'When are you going to sign a four- or five-picture contract with us? Please come and see us.' Every day they kept asking me to sign the contract. Then they saw the cut version and barred me from the lot...the picture was just too dark and black and strange for them...there’s something missing there that I don’t know about, that I’ll never understand. It’s the only trouble I’ve ever had that I can’t begin to fathom. And I really thought I was home again, you know and, 'I’m going to be at Universal three or four years making pictures' -- the way they talked. Then suddenly I couldn’t get on the lot."What remained, even in its initial theatrical form, was the stuff of a swaggering genius. Welles' famed opening shot, at that time the greatest tracking shot ever captured on film, established the entire setup as well as the protagonist (Heston) in just over two minutes of daring, swooping crane moves, accompanied by an unforgettable theme by Henry Mancini.
Reader Comments (4)
Brilliant piece, Colin-- loved all of the wonderful insights and valuable research. Haven't yet read This is Orson Welles but you definitely made me want to check it out. Thanks!
Wow, awesome look at one of my all time favorite films. The compositions and cinematography in this film are STUNNING. Just a great all around film. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Why thank you. He was the subject of my master's thesis, so I thought I'd share.
people sometimes forget that TOE is as much a comedy as it is a noir, although it isn't exactly Pillow Talk. Maybe what makes the movie so good is how absolutely likable all the characters are, despite how grotesque they are. There's something positively medieval about the characters, something that shows up in Kiss Me Deadly and with Mose Harper in The Searchers. A funny time, the late 50's