Touch of Evil: but Universal has personal space issues

As part of a recent application process, I had to write a review of a film that I'd recently seen. I did mine on Touch of Evil, which has just been given a comprehensive Masters of Cinema re-release and is good. More on Orson Welles some other time.

Touch of Evil

Dir. Orson Welles

Universal, 1958

Having enjoyed unprecedented creative control at the onset of his Hollywood career, Orson Welles' fortunes waned in the years that followed, his unreliable genius doing little to endear him to profit-driven studio heads. Shot upon his return from a period of European exile, Touch of Evil, his 1958 adaptation of a pulpy Whit Masterson novel, was intended to re-establish the director as a bankable star. Heavily edited and buried as a B-picture, it's only recently in its restored form that the film has found the audience it deserves.

The story begins in Mexico as a bomb is planted inside a car. One rightly acclaimed tracking shot later and we see it detonate over the US border. Honeymooning Mexican drug enforcement officer Mike Vargus (Charlton Heston) meets local Police Captain Hank Quinlan (Welles) at the scene of the explosion and the pair clash from the outset. Quinlan, a corpulent embodiment of small town greed and corruption, ensures that all crimes are solved in accordance with his suspicions. When Vargus questions the legality of the Captain's methods, Quinlan concocts a plan to discredit his opponent. What follows is a warped depiction of beat culture as Vargus' wife (Janet Leigh) is terrorized in a desolate motel, leading to a masterful ending sequence, the rapid-fire editing of which predicts later Welles classic F for Fake.

A genre film steeped in the conventions of film noir, Touch of Evil was nevertheless ahead of its time. Its cynical tone, moral ambiguity and palpable sense of decay were too intense for contemporary audiences, Quinlan's eventual redemption of sorts paving the way for the anti-heroes of '70s cinema. Over the next three decades, Welles worked primarily as a jobbing actor, struggling to raise the funds for his own directorial offerings. Though he had further triumphs in this field, he would never make another film quite so potent.

Lewis Porteous