Touch of Evil | | Cast : | Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh | | Director : | Orson Welles | | Studio : | Universal Studios | | Format : | Black & White, Widescreen | | Released Date : | January 01, 1958 | | DVD Released Date : | June 28, 2004 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | Unrated | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 25, 2005 | | Summary | I'm giving up on Orson Wells | Content
 | Once again I sat watching an Orson Wells picture trying to figure out why so many people think this guy was a genius. I'll admit that the camera work, lighting, and direction were all good. Especially for the time. If that makes him a genius than I guess he is. The movie itself is about a Mexican narcotics agent named Mike Vargas played by Heston and his wife played by Janet Leigh. They end up being too close to an assassination attempt and Vargas gets dragged in to the investigation to try and help out since it happened right on the Mexican/American border. Vargas is also the target of repeated attempts to smear his name, and disfigure him, He is the prosecuting attorney against a man who is involved in some kind of cartel and his family wants Vargas to back off.
Wells plays a crooked police chief named Quinlan. Though you don't know he's crooked until much later in the film. He is investigating the assassination on the border case. He is a bigot, doesn't hide it, and doesn't like Vargas. Round and round we go until Quinlan solves the case by planting evidence to arrest a young Mexican man who he is sure commited the crime. But Vargas witnessed the plant and vows to set the record straight. Most of this time Vargas's wife has been kept in a empty hotel out in the middle of the desert to keep her "safe" but she is not safe at all as this hotel is owned by the cartel that is trynig to smear her husband. The head of the cartel and Quinlan decide to join forces to really put Vargas away for good. They kidnap his wife and make it look like she's a drug using lesbian. I guess I won't give away the ending for those of you that haven't seen it. One thing I really thought was stupid about the ending though, is they almost try to leave it implying that Quinlan is some how in the right and really didn't deserve his fate. This had to be the idiocy of Wells at work. In my opinion he was a very pompous man, very full of himself. He was a genius in his own mind and expected everyone to agree with him. When he recieved lukewarm reviews from the critics and moderate box office success, he left the country and vowed never to make another movie. And he didn't. Much later he would write a 58 page memo to the studio, pleading with them to restore his ideas to the film, 58 PAGES! In '98 they finally did and it's still not that good. I think Wells was a mixed up, somewhat disturbed, idiot of a man who thought he was better than the rest of us. I think he made this movie just to make a weird and visually confusing picture. And I think I've seen all the Orson Wells I need to. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 10, 2005 | | Summary | Pulp Fiction Filmed With Wellesian Vigor | Content
| A bedeviled masterwork from Orson Welles, 1958's "Touch of Evil" is as stylish a piece of film noir cinema as I have ever seen, all the more arresting for the fact that the plot is pure dime-store pulp fiction same as his earlier classic "The Lady from Shanghai". This time, he plays Hank Quinlan, the central character, a grossly obese, corrupt police captain in a Mexican border town named Los Robles, evidently once an idealistic law enforcer who let his ego take control toward a Machiavellian sense of power over the town. For instance, when he thinks he's right about a suspect, Quinlan will manufacture evidence than uncover real facts to expedite his cases. While Quinlan's bloated physical state is an obvious metaphor for his moral decline, it is painful to watch Welles embody the character so literally knowing how his own career was in decline at the time. Yet, he is as masterful as he was in "Citizen Kane", evoking the increasing isolation of a man obsessed by power.
As a director, he remains peerless when it comes to heightening the pictorial aspects of film. No one composed shots more dramatically than Welles, and he used deep shadows to enhance the seediness of the plot. The expert cinematography is by Russell Metty. His famously lengthy opening tracking shot through the streets and over buildings is still a marvel of seamless exposition, and he did an even longer, more subtle single shot in the apartment where the incriminating dynamite is placed. Welles audaciously cast several name actors in pivotal roles starting with the leads. In between his massive Biblical epics "The Ten Commandments" and "Ben-Hur", Charlton Heston actually gives what I think is his career-best performance as Mexican narcotics officer Mike Vargas, the moral opposite of Quinlan who gets caught in the captain's web as he is honeymooning with his American wife Susan. She is portrayed by Janet Leigh, who for once, comes across as effortlessly sexy here before she is dragged through the corruption herself. Their characters are entangled in the car explosion murder of a rich contractor and his girlfriend and the labyrinth of frame-ups instigated by Quinlan to uphold his standing.
The inhabitants of Los Robles are a rogue's gallery of eccentric characters filled with some surprising star cameos. Welles provides legend Marlene Dietrich with one of her best roles as Tanya, a cynical Gypsy fortune teller who still has some residue feeling for Quinlan. Zsa Zsa Gabor stops by for about twenty seconds in a non-speaking part as a strip joint owner, just enough not to ruin the movie. Dennis Weaver, on the other hand, overplays the nervous, sex-crazed motel manager as almost a precursor to Norman Bates from "Psycho", a parallel made ironic by the presence of Leigh in a similarly abandoned motel. His character seems pitched somewhere between Anthony Perkins and Don Knotts. Russian-born character actor Akim Tamiroff is effectively greasy as Uncle Joe Grandi, a sweaty drug dealer with a terrible toupee, constantly looking like a pig facing slaughter. Joseph Calleia is excellent as Pete Menzies, Quinlan's longtime partner who has grown weary of being his pigeon. Mercedes McCambridge has a slimy bit as a leather-jacketed dyke. There are also a blind shopkeeper, a drug smuggler, a terrorizing gang of juvenile delinquents who instigate a rape, and ancillary parts played by "Citizen Kane" alumni, Joseph Cotten and Ray Collins.
The story behind the 1998 re-edit presented here is fascinating, as it reflects a 58-page memo from Welles to Universal Studios chief Ed Muhl after the filmmaker saw the bastardized cut. Master film editor Walter Murch followed Welles' instructions and reinserted scenes deleted from the original release. Much of this is chronicled in Michael Ondaatje's insightful 2002 interview book, "The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film". The text of the memo and the film trailer are the only real extras in the DVD. Even with its flaws and the story's inherent tawdriness, this is essential viewing of work by a master who could never maintain the momentum of his genius in Hollywood. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 06, 2005 | | Summary | "Don't leave her in the motel !" | Content
| If you find yourself shouting at the performers when you see some of the decisions they make, the movie has you totally engrossed. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 06, 2005 | | Summary | Touch of Evil: to walk forward without ever really advancing | Content
| In 1957, Orson Welles returned from a 10-year long self-imposed exile in Europe to make what would be the last of his Hollywood feature films, Touch of Evil. In Hollywood, he had always been treated as the boy genius in want of a proper comeuppance. And, as a consequence, Welles only ever succeeded in making one film--his first, Citizen Kane--that was not, at some point, sequestered by the studio for re-editing and the insertion of additional over-explicating re-shoots by studio hacks. These hacks functioned rather like the staff painters at the Vatican who defaced Michelangelo's Last Judgement, covering the genitalia of the damned, lest someone forget the actual intent of this great mortal lesson on the flesh. In any case, the studio got a look at the then largely unedited version of the film while Welles was off appearing on the Steve Allen show in New York. They were predictably horrified at the innovative editing, camera and sound work on what the studio had hoped would be a standard B movie, and so, instantly banned Welles from the editing room and hired, somewhat on cue, a hack to shoot and re-shoot bits of the film. Welles was invited to watch the screening of the final version after which he left angry and--some say--in tears. Amazingly, he went directly home, sat down at his typewriter and composed a 58-page letter that outlined how he had intended the film to play. The letter was lost but resurfaced in 1992, inspiring editor and director Walter Murch to undertake a re-editing of the movie in compliance with the specifications and suggestions in the letter. The new version was released in theaters in 1999, incorporating some 50 changes and is now available in the new deluxe DVD edition.
For cinemaphiles, Touch of Evil has, perhaps, the finest of all opening sequences. It opens with a close-up of a bomb, which is set to go off in 3 minutes and twenty seconds, the very length, incidentally, of this uncut crane and tracking shot. The camera pulls back, turns, lifts and falls--only to do more of the same until the explosion. In the process, we are introduced to Miguel Vargas, a Mexican detective, and his new wife, Susan. As they wander down the street and across the border, heading for their hotel, they repeatedly cross paths with the car and its ticking contents. The car explodes and the pot is stirred. To the surface comes Hank Quinlan. He's been the sheriff of Los Robles for some thirty years and is treated by locals as a hard but honest enforcer. After thirty years, however, he appears to have swallowed and grown fat with all the city's sins and ambles sweatingly about as a kind of ailing, lame king figure, awaiting the inevitable, younger usurper. And for Quinlan, that would be Miguel Vargas, whose foreign and, perhaps, conflicting celebrity seems a pointed threat. Their conflict, as they attempt to find the bomber, is intercut with scenes tracking Susan's course on that same night and the next day.
In Welles original version, these three stories--Miguel's, Quinlans's and Susan's--were of near equal weight, the narrative moving back and forth between them in more or less equally long sequences of 3 minutes. The studio, however, feared for the lesser intelligence of the American public and so, recut the film into longer, more conventional narrative units of some 10 and 15 minutes each, with the subsequent effect of fully subordinating Susan's abduction and torture to Miguel's quest to expose Quinlan's corruption. Editor Walter Murch has attempted, in this latest version, to restore something of the original frenetic cross-cutting but was hampered by what was swept away from the editing floor many, many years ago and having--even in one instance--to retain an uninspired 10-minute re-shoot by a studio hack for the sake narrative continuity.
And such was the fate of all previous work that Welles had done for Hollywood--with the miraculous exception of Citizen Cane. Incidentally, Citizen Cane is now commonly considered the first film noir, usurping the title once carried by The Maltese Falcon, released that same year--1941. In it, audiences were introduced to all the themes and stylistic elements that would come to be associated with this favorite film genre--the only genre, if you think about it, in which Welles ever really worked and the genre for which he provided not only the seminal seed, in Citizen Cane, but also the so-called "baroque tombstone" in Touch of Evil. Both films involve a fallen, defeated hero of sorts whose story is only half gathered from a broken, distorted narrative. And while there are very few stylistic elements that they don't share, Touch of Evil is the more fearsomely frenetic. There is that famous opening shot, followed by what must have been the first running hand held shot in a studio fiction. The story is broken into pieces that are presented in a kind of perpetually careening criss-cross in which the principles meet and separate, clash and rebound over and over and over again. It meets--as best as contemporary material can--the criteria for Greek tragedy and would appear to be aiming, somewhat, at the greatest example of that genre--Oedipus Rex. Hank Quinlan is almost always found amongst a group of admirers, hangers-on and indebted politicos who circle him constantly amidst all the visual whirl, acting as a kind of flunky chorus, singing the praises of his past, yipping at his now mean focus on the present crime, looking for a future without him. Quinlan is the creature that metamorphosed into the three-legged version of itself in the evening of its life. He still towers against the sets but struggles to lift his feet from the ground, to sway somewhere, to breathe--engaged in the nightmarish futility of trying to walk forward without ever really advancing. He is grown large, sweaty, ailing, wandering the town on his cane--a symbol of his erupting weakness, his tragic flaw. After 30 years, he oversteps. Quinlan had never taken any money, as many would have, but he planted evidence. And rationalizes it by telling himself, and his partner, "I never framed anybody--unless they guilty." But Quinlan's very presence in the town is a sin for which no one is quite sober in mind, spirit or soul. Results are made--and made to fit a world that is all slightly askew. Facts are manufactured and then set at weird angles in the vain, psychotic hope that everything will look natural if everything is made to look equally unnatural through the same corrupting lens. And in the end, Quinlan, the planter of evidence, unwittingly plants evidence against himself. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 26, 2005 | | Summary | Orson Welles at his Best | Content
| It's a movie that gives you a feeling of satisfaction after you've watched it. The cast is A+ and the acting is just as good, especially the classic performances from Charleston Heston and Orson Welles. If you like a good mystery then you should check this out. You won't be sorry. |
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