Film Review: Touch of Evil

This new version of "Touch of Evil" (showing in Dublin's IFC until Aug 12th) sees the classic film noir restored to how its director and star Orson Welles always intended. When originally released it was butchered by the studio who were not fully tuned in to Welles' ideas. With the help of a 58-page memo sent by Welles to Universal after seeing their production the film, Oscar-winning editor Walter Murch has, 40 years later, recut the film. There is not much extra footage, simply a re-ordering of scenes and a more economical use of Henry Mancini's soundtrack. And what's more, the spell-binding opening scene - a 3 minute tracking shot done in one take - is no longer scarred by the credit sequence or jazzy score.

This 'director's cut' further strengthens the moral ambiguity and confusion that Welles intended for his film; his excessive style manifested in extreme camera angles, light/dark contrasts, and violent fragmentations of shots.

Welles' baroque border-town murder mystery is a wild masterpiece - a sleazy, grimy, and ultimately dazzling work of cinematic magic. Charlton Heston plays straight-arrow Mexican government agent Mike Vargas, whose planned honeymoon with his American bride, Susie (Janet Leigh), is derailed by a sensational murder. Enter police detective Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) - bloated, with a grotesque doughy face and ill manner. An instant antagonism develops between the educated Vargas and the misanthropic Quinlan. This intensifies to a rabid hatred when Vargas uncovers evidence that Quinlan has framed a suspect.

As the plot develops, so too does Welles' expressionistic style - looming low angles, jittery handheld shots, edgy editing. The new cutting design outlined by Welles serves this style better. The subsequent scenes are tightened up with insistent intercutting between the Vargas/Quinlan confrontations on the American side of the border and Susie's run-in with racketeer "Uncle Joe" Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) in Mexico. The pace has greater urgency and tension. For 111 dizzy minutes, Welles is our tour guide in this sordid world and we never know who's going to turn up next, whether it's Marlene Dietrich as the blowsy Tanya, Zsa Zsa Gabor as a nightclub owner, Mercedes McCambridge as a lesbian delinquent, Dennis Weaver as a motel night manager, or Joseph Cotten as an uncredited detective.

To jaded industry hacks of 1958, Welles may have seemed little more than a has-been, but no one then or now could tell a story quite the way he could. Touch of Evil has never looked or sounded better. For my money it has never worked better either.

Brian O'Riordain

See also Stephen's review of another Orson Welles masterpiece - 'The Third Man'
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