TOUCH OF EVIL
A bland, miscast Charlton Heston as
a Mexican narcotics investigator (Heston's NRA speeches are livelier
than this insipid attempt at playing a Latino) is the only false
note in Orson Welles' brilliant 1958 noir about the downfall
of a corrupt, racist police captain in a Mexican border town.
Investigating the car-bombing deaths of a millionaire and his
mistress at the U.S.-Mexican border, Heston's Agent Mike Vargas
finds himself butting heads with Welles' Capt. Hank Quinlan, a
detective with a high conviction rate — and a penchant for
bullying suspects and falsifying evidence. When Vargas accuses
the captain of framing the murdered millionaire's Mexican son-in-law
for the bombing, Quinlan plots with Vargas' other nemesis, local
gangster "Uncle Joe" Grandi (Akim Tamiroff), to tarnish
the reputations of Vargas and his Caucasian wife (Janet Leigh).
For this adaptation of Whit Masterson's
pulp novel Badge of Evil, Welles set out to take a predictable
little B-movie and make it his way, with surreal camerawork (the
exceptional cinematography is by Russell Metty), scenes shot in
long single takes and overlapping dialogue — techniques that
were revolutionary in Welles' heyday. Also, no other director
could understand Quinlan better than Welles the classic outsider
(Quinlan is like a twisted funhouse-mirror version of Welles himself)
— Welles took Quinlan and made him more than just a cardboard
villain. The character, like Charles Foster Kane, is a terrific
Welles study of egotism and corruption. Touch of Evil could
only have been made by a maverick, and it's scuzzy and unconventional
in ways that were so jarring back in 1958 Universal execs intervened
in the editing, shot new scenes and reduced the film's running
time.
In the '70s, restoration experts discarded
the studio-mandated footage and pieced together a version of Touch
of Evil that was somewhat closer to Welles' original vision
— for years, this longer cable and video version was widely
considered the definitive edition. For its 40th anniversary, Touch
of Evil has been reedited again, and this new cut is the closest
to Welles' vision (producer Rick Schmidlin's restoration team
followed a 58-page memo Welles wrote in response to Universal's
changes). There's no new footage in this version, but the credits
that were intrusive during the film's mesmerizing three-minute,
one-take opening crane shot have been removed and transferred
to the film's end, like in Citizen Kane, some scenes have
been rearranged and Henry Mancini's wonderfully seedy, brassy
Afro-Cuban theme music has been downplayed. The composer's breakthrough
score consisted entirely of source cues, except for the theme,
which played memorably over the opening in previous cuts but has
now been excised from the soundtrack — an omission that seems
like a misstep at first, but the change will grow on you.
© 1999 Jim Aquino