So, here’s a little something that I am not overly proud of: the first time I saw Touch of Evil was sort of a mistake. I was looking for an Orson Welles film where he played a very famous villain but could not quite remember the name. As such, I purchased the DVD for Touch of Evil. Of course, the film I was looking for was actually The Third Man where, yes, Welles’s Harry Lime is about as despicable as they come. I knew pretty much nothing about Touch of Evil, but I finished the film anyway. Yes, Welles plays another despicable character this time around, but this one lacks Harry Lime’s overall charisma. No one is going to go looking for Captain Hank Quinlan the way so many people do Harry Lime.
I think the film is better for it, frankly.
Now, I know I ended the previous entry in the Stacker Countdown with a blurb referring to Welles as a master director similar to Hitchcock. I still think that’s true even if Welles directed far fewer films than Hitchcock did. Considering Welles’s rookie effort is often called the greatest film ever made (and I’ll get to that one later in the Countdown), that’s no mean feat. However, Welles’s films were more challenged by studios, with more than one left unfinished at Welles’s death, and there’s a part of me that was greatly amused when the HBO movie Hemmingway & Gellhorn showed the Hemmingway character clashing with a temperamental actor over some narration for a documentary of some kind where, though I do not think the actor was named, was clearly supposed to be Welles, another man known for his temper and artistic integrity. Considering Welles, late in life, was reduced to doing TV commercials and his now-legendary difficulty over one was recorded for posterity, this is a man who cared more for his art that a lot of other people around him apparently did. There’s a reason the voice of the Brain from Pinky and the Brain was modeled after Welles’s own distinct vocal style.
So, here’s a film where Welles, acting as one of the main characters, using a script he’d written, and directed by himself, shows himself in the least flattering light possible.
It’s not unknown for actors, directing themselves in a film, to give themselves the flashiest possible role. My go-to example is probably Edward Norton (another actor known to be difficult to work with at times) giving himself the starring role in the period crime drama Motherless Brooklyn. I may have walked out of the theater incredibly impressed with that film, but the trailers, complete with the announcement that Norton had directed the film, made it look an awful lot like a vanity project. Here’s Norton playing a detective with Tourette’s syndrome in what looks like a 1950s setting. It was practically screaming “Look at me!” And yet, I enjoyed the film quite a bit, well more than I expected to. I always say of it that it was a vanity project that justified the vanity. Another actor could have taken the Norton role, but Norton the director had an overall vision he needed to do, and putting himself in the lead role was only part of it.
Now take that concept and see how Welles fits into Touch of Evil. Like with Norton, Welles’s own role is clearly the flashiest, but unlike Norton’s, there’s nothing all that charismatic or flattering about Hank Quinlan. Welles was only 43 years old in 1958, but he looks older here. So many shots are set to be as unflattering as possible, often done to reflect Welles’s gut in a manner reminiscent of how Sidney Greenstreet’s girth was used in The Maltese Falcon. Welles is unshaven, with a gummy look around the eyes. He’s irritable, racist towards his Mexican counterpart, and when he isn’t chomping on a cigar, he’s stuffing food in his face. That last one, though, is for a good reason as Quinlan is a recovered alcoholic and the candy is to keep him from drinking.
Contrast that with Charlton Heston’s Mexican prosecutor Ramon Vargas. Vargas is handsome, suave, and no wilting daisy. When a young stooge of a local crime boss tries to throw a bottle of acid at Vargas, he’s quick to prevent the acid from hitting him while sending his attacker fleeing. Currently on his honeymoon with his new American wife Susie (Janet Leigh), about the only thing that doesn’t make the Vargas character a traditional American crusading hero type is that he’s Mexican. Or as Mexican as Heston can make him. One of the few obvious weaknesses to the film is Heston in brownface speaking with a not-particularly-good Mexican accent. Granted, this was 1958, but I still have a hard time believing that no one involved in this film couldn’t have found a more convincing-looking actor to play a Mexican. Or, you know, an actual Mexican actor. That said, there is a part of me that’s very glad a film from this era played the Mexican man as the clean-cut guy who follows all the proper rules and procedures while the American is the unruly slob who plays with loopholes and plants evidence. I can see far too many films in all kinds of eras either showing equal corruption or assuming the non-American is the corrupt one.
However, therein lies the central conflict between Vargas and Quinlan. After a masterful, four minute single shot of a bomb being placed in the trunk of a car while a tracking shot follows the vehicle as it weaves in and around traffic before finally exploding in the border area between Mexico and the United States, with attention shifting to Vargas and Susie as they walk along the same road and keep coming into close contact with the same vehicle, the chase is on to find the bomber. Quinlan finds a poor Mexican farmer living on the American side of the border, the secret son-in-law of the dead man, and essentially frames him for the crime by planting evidence. Straight-arrow Vargas won’t go along with that, and the two clash when one of Vargas’s enemies, a Mexican ganglord called Uncle Grandi (Akim Tamiroff), gets Quinlan to fall off the wagon and go along with a plan to take care of Vargas. Quinlan, though a drunk, is also a mean drunk, and the whole scheme eventually falls apart, including a plan to frame Susie for Grandi’s murder.
Which honestly makes the final moments of the film somewhat ironic: Quinlan was right. The killer was exactly who he said it was. Planting the evidence, something he’d apparently done before, may not have been completely necessary. He wasn’t framing an innocent man. If anything, he was framing a guilty man in an effort that eventually led to a confession. He was, as one onlooker put it, a great detective but a lousy cop. So where does that “touch of evil” come into play? Is it Quinlan and his obviously corrupt ways, overlooked because he gets the correct results anyway? Is it Uncle Grandi for plying the recovered alcoholic with drink? Is it how Quinlan is so protective of himself that he’d murder to stay on the job? And if Quinlan was correct in fingering the guilty parties of various crimes even as he placed incriminating evidence to secure convictions, was he using evil methods for good ends? These are the sorts of questions a good noir mystery should provoke, and Touch of Evil produces them.
On a final note, I had to go with a DVD copy of this film for the Stacker Challenge, and I had forgotten that what I had, while not a director’s cut, was an edit based on a 58-page memo Welles submitted to Universal Studios after they edited down his initial vision. At the time, Welles’s memo was ignored, and the film ran about an hour and a half. Mine was about twenty minutes longer, and it is the only version I have ever seen. I am a wee bit curious what the differences were, to be honest, but not enough to track the theatrical release down. Then again, it might be included on my DVD. Regardless, I’m satisfied with the version I watched.
NEXT: I may have originally gotten Touch of Evil based on the reputation of a different film, but my next entry will be one I know solely by its own reputation, the brutal antiwar animated feature from Japan, 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies.
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