Touch up

Mending Orson Welles's Evil ways

by Peter Keough

TOUCH OF EVIL. Written and directed by Orson Welles. With Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Akim Tamiroff, Joseph Calleia, Joanna Moore, Ray Collins, Mort Mills, Victor Milian, and Mercedes McCambridge. An October Films release. At the Avon Repertory Cinema, October 16 through 22.

It wasn't supposed to be a masterpiece, just a solid commercial venture that would restore Orson Welles's credibility with Hollywood, where he hadn't worked in 10 years -- since his last studio-made masterpiece, The Lady from Shanghai, bewildered everyone and bombed. Three minutes into 1958's Touch of Evil, however, it was clear that Welles couldn't help himself -- it was the longest tracking shot in history, setting up every element of the brilliant, melancholy film noir to follow, summing up the genre of which it was one of the last and greatest examples, and blurring the boundaries between good and evil, duty and corruption, longing and loss that this film would forever define.

That despite Universal's ham-handed recutting of Welles's original version. Nonetheless, the newly edited release -- produced after years of painstaking labor by Walter Murch and Rick Schmidlin based on a 58-page memo Welles sent to the studio in a last-ditch effort to preserve as much as possible of his handiwork -- is a boon to those who take the director, and film, seriously. The changes are subtle but comprehensive, drawing one inexorably into the eddying streams of narrative and the sourly claustrophobic setting. What at times seemed eccentric now feels inevitable; it unreels like a seedy, shaggy-dog tragedy.

The most obvious changes are in the legendary opening, in which two couples -- a rich American businessman and his blond bimbo joyriding in a convertible, and narcotics officer Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston, in his best performance) and his new bride, Susan (Janet Leigh, likewise) -- take their intersecting, fateful paths through a dingy Mexican town and over the border to the United States. Previous versions had credits pasted on; there are none now. Instead of the jazzy Henry Mancini score, the scene is enveloped by the ambient sound Welles intended, a cacophony of car horns, randy jukeboxes, bleating goats, and a doomed car radio. Both soundtrack and visuals immerse you in a world both ambiguous and inescapable.

Not that Vargas tries very hard to get away. When the other couple's car explodes -- killing them -- just as he and Susan are about to kiss, his first impulse is to send his bride back to their hotel and play policeman and investigate. Separated, the two are at the mercy of evil influences, with the intertwining of their divergent trajectories clearer now that Welles's original cross-cutting has replaced the studio's clunkier, more "linear" editing. A young tough waylays Susan and takes her to "Uncle Joe" Grandi (a menacing, absurd and pitiable Akim Tamiroff), the brother of a druglord Vargas is about to prosecute in Mexico City. In her spirited naïveté, she exposes herself to Grandi's grandiose and sordid blackmail scheme.

Vargas, meanwhile, comes under the basilisk eye of Hank Quinlan (Welles, hilarious and heartbreaking), the local police chief with a vendetta against criminals -- his wife was murdered years before and the killer was never caught. He's set on pinning the murders on Sanchez (Victor Milian), a Mexican involved with the dead man's daughter. In another, even longer tour de force one-shot sequence, Quinlan interrogates Sanchez and searches his apartment, planting evidence to frame him. Vargas discovers the fraud, but the closer he gets to proving it, the more he removes himself from Susan, and the more vulnerable he becomes.

In a sense, Touch of Evil is the inverse of the standard film noir: the femme, instead of being fatale, is the hero's one chance of redemption. The villain's, too. In Quinlan's case, the love interest is his partner, Menzies (a haunting Joseph Calleia, whose performance is enhanced by the new edit, most notably the elimination of a crude reaction shot that debases his motivation), a faithful dog with a canine intuition for rectitude. As Quinlan gets seduced by the wheedling Grandi, their images are reflected on the window Menzies looks through; he's resigned, disapproving, loyal.

Then there's Marlene Dietrich's iconic Tanya, the gypsyish proprietor of the chili joint Quinlan haunted in his drinking days, perhaps a one-time flame, who refuses to read the driven man's future. "You haven't got any," she says. "Your future is all used up." That proved true for Welles with Hollywood. And as this radiantly dark re-release demonstrates, the loss was mostly ours.

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Lucky Leigh

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