Touch of Evil is a lurid, enjoyable B-movie thrill ride
By Wallace Baine Film writer Santa Cruz Sentinel
It's a moment that still thrills film buffs. Near the end of 1958's `Touch of Evil,' Orson Welles, corpulent and slurring, looks to Marlene Dietrich, playing a seedy border-town fortune-teller. `Tell me my future,' he says. She looks at him contemptuously, `You haven't got any. Your future's all used up.' That moment, of course, resonates far beyond the plot of this lurid, gripping and satisfying B-reel film noir, newly re-released 40 years later. >From that point, Welles himself had no future, at least not as the filmmaker of importance he was destined to be after `Citizen Kane' in 1941. >From the time he descends into a dark, dirty river in the last minutes of `Touch of Evil,' it was a long slide into voice-over narration for someone else's forgettable movies, embarrassing talk-show appearances and kitschy wine commercials. The re-release of `Touch of Evil' marks a redemption for Hollywood's most famous fat man (Saturday marks the 13th anniversary of Welles's death). This new artifact is not merely a 40th anniversary marketing ploy. It is, subtly but fundamentally, a different movie. Bay Area sound man and film editor Walter Murch, one of the most admired figures in the film industry, actually re-cut the original `Touch of Evil' according to the wishes of its long deceased director/writer who was denied a final cut on the original. More on that later. `Touch of Evil' is a pop culture landmark mainly because it remains one of the finest examples of art emerging from trash. Using the streets of Venice (that's LA; not Italy) to resemble a scuzzy, sinister Mexican border town called Los Robles, Welles tells the story of Mike Vargas, an upright, newly married Mexican law enforcement officer (Charlton Heston) dealing with a double homicide, which compels him to lock horns with his opposite number on the U.S. side of the border, a vicious, candy-bar-chomping, turf-conscious autocrat named Hank Quinlan (Welles). Vargas interrupts his honeymoon to investigate a fatal car-bombing. The car explodes on American soil, but it's clear the bomb was planted on the Mexican side, giving Vargas justification to claim jurisdiction. But Quinlan and his cronies are interested in a quick frame-up to put the case to rest. Vargas then turns his attention to Quinlan's corrupt methods (such as routinely planting evidence) and as he seeks out allies to bring down the embittered police captain, his comely young bride (Janet Leigh) is sucked into a vortex of danger fueled by sex, drugs and organized crime. Potentially delicious, certainly. But such a plot can also describe boilerplate film noir, which is apparently what Universal had in mind when the studio barred Welles from the set after seeing his first cut and then released its own version, complete with re-shoots of added material. It was harsh treatment for the one-time boy-wonder filmmaker and Welles responded in kind with a 58-page memo to Universal, outlining to the smallest detail what he had in mind for the film. It is from that remarkable document that Murch (the editor of such films as `Apocalypse Now' and `The English Patient') re-assembled the picture according to Welles's wishes. Most notably restored is the famous opening shot, the astounding, three-minute-20-second continuous shot that begins with an anonymous figure planting the bomb in the trunk of the car, swoops skyward to show the layout of Los Robles and to follow the ill-fated car as it moves through the border checkpoint, finally settling on the startled faces of Heston and Leigh, just about to kiss, the moment the car explodes. (That technique has been copied several times over the years, most recently in the opening to last year's `Boogie Nights'). The philistines at Universal had slapped opening titles all over the shot much to Welles's chagrin. The removal of the titles was the largest of about 50 changes Murch made to the film -- the smallest included things such as adding off-camera grunts to the soundtrack (Welles was nothing if not a fetishist). All that stuff is terrific, but what makes `Touch of Evil' such a kick is how the characterizations blend so well with their murky, menacing surroundings. Welles especially is transfixing as the toad-like, malignant Quinlan. When we first see him, struggling out of his car at the site of the car bombing, his bulk, his dyspeptic expression and the small, diseased eyes that hint at a dead soul are striking. At the time, Welles wasn't the eminence he was later in life and he needed considerable padding and make-up to become such a monster. To underscore the fact that Quinlan has slipped into an abyss of self-loathing, there's a scene near the beginning when he walks into Marlene Dietrich's salon. The two obviously have a history, but she doesn't recognize the man he's become. Pitifully sucking on a candy bar, Quinlan explains away his size saying `It's the hooch mostly,' then, almost tenderly, `I wish it was your chili I was getting fat on.' The other major change in the film has to do with intercutting Vargas's struggles against Quinlan with his wife's desperate straits at a desert hotel where she is threatened by a gang of toughs under the direction of a sleazy crime boss out to intimidate Vargas. Previously, the plotlines were offered separately, but here the stories are woven together to create parallel suspense. The scenes at the remote desert hotel, where Vargas had put his wife in the mistaken belief she'd be safe there, are by today's explicit standards almost corny. But they are also vividly surreal, like snatches from an interrupted nightmare. Lounging in her hotel room in her unmentionables, Janet Leigh, who just a few years later was to participate in cinema's most famous shower scene, radiates a disturbingly sexual kind of vulnerability who by her very ripeness seems to invite corruption (That corruption comes in the form of drugs, not sex). Also unforgettable is a young Dennis Weaver as the googly-eyed, maniacal hotel manager babbling incoherently from fear and menace. All these characters tend toward the grotesque, reminding us that `Touch of Evil' is after all a B-movie. Still, the manner in which they are framed is low pleasure at its most intoxicating. Only Heston, as the film's avenging hero, fails to connect. For one thing, he's about as convincing as a Mexican as Garrison Keillor would be. He seems to abandon a tentative Mexican accent half way through. He also seems free of the demons that drive the characters around him. Even when Vargas realizes that his wife has been kidnapped, his rage simply doesn't have the same dimension as the dark emotions that run through the rest of the film. Walter Murch, the man who carried out Welles's wishes from beyond the grave, is a sound man at heart. And it is the sound innovations, coupled with the director's dark, contrasty images, that give `Touch of Evil' such a perverse vibe. In that famous opening shot, Henry Mancini's opening theme is jettisoned in favor of an impressionistic swirl of street music, squawking out of cheap tin speakers and swelling and fading as the characters move through the set. As any writer can tell you, what happened to Welles during `Touch of Evil' can hardly be seen as merely a sad irony of history. It happens every day, in TV and cinema, where writers routinely lose control over their creations, eventually seeing the germ of their ideas warped and misrepresented by non-writers with big money at stake. This is not always the high crime against art that artists would have you believe. Some auteurs could use some judicious collaboration (Have you seen Joel and Ethan Coen's `The Big Lebowski'?). But the larger-than-life Orson Welles gives screenwriters an example to follow: write everything -- yes, everything -- down and leave it in a prominent place where someone will find it 20 years after your death when presumably your genius will finally be recognized. If this catches on, it may spawn a whole generation of re-interpreters seeing in nearly every finished movie a better one struggling to break free.
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