Touch of Evil

I'm going to review this without reading anything by other critics or academics who've had anything to say on the film. I heard David and Margaret say that the beginning of the film has an amazing single-take, but that's it.

The reason is quite simple: Everything has been said about Orson Welles, it's like trying to review Alfred Hitchcock. It is off-putting, to say the least, to write something knowing for a fact it's already been written dozens of times before. At least this way I can pretend my words are fresh, an enjoyable illusion.

One of the interesting things about Hollywood in the 50's is that a-list films often only showed the glitzy, glamorous face of the US. To get grime, you had to look to b-list films, usually involving Roger Corman. There were exceptions, one that immediately springs to mind is Blackboard Jungle (1955). But usually, even when dealing with crime, there was a certain shine to the seediness.

Touch of Evil (1958) is not such a movie. It is steeped in filth. One memorable scene has a man washing blood off his hands in putrid water. It seems to sum up one of the main themes of the movie, the omnipresence of corruption.

Corruption is personified in the character of the detective Quinlan (Orson Welles). He is morbidly obese, his face twisted and unshaven, he talks only in mutters. He is apologetically bigoted, openly contemptuous of humankind, and finds no solace in drink, candy-bars, or his former paramour Tanya. It seems that the cause of his profligacy is the murder of his wife, a case he never solved. To compensate, he ensures he solves every murder case since, even - and especially - if he has to frame someone to do it.

His counterweight is Mexican narcotics officer Vargas (Charlton Heston in blackface). Vargas is indefatigable in his pursuit of the evil that blights Welles's Mexico, but is the sort who would rather see a hundred of the guilty walk than an innocent condemned. He locks horns with Quinlan when Quinlan frames yet another suspect over the bombing death of an American citizen.

The film is incredibly well-made, you can drink in every scene as though you were viewing portraits in the Louvre. Sometimes the dialogue is muddled as actors talk over one another. I am in two minds about directors who allow their actors to do this. On the one hand it does add some realism to film - after all, in real life we all talk over one another. But on the other hand, it confuses the action, and I think that film-makers would be better off realising that film isn't 'real life', it is film. There are situations where this technique works, but Evil is not one of them.

Still, I spent more time writing about these bad moments than there are in the film. The film is amazing at building intensity and suspense. It is a worthy rival of the best of Hitchcock. It is because of Welles's mastery with the camera that this film is usually listed in the top ten crime films (if not the top ten films) of the 50's.