Throughout his career, Orson Welles remained preoccupied with notions of power, exile, corruption, old age, the loss of innocence, the betrayals of friendship, and the indelible nature or essence of character. Arguably at war with a filmmaking establishment – wherever it was found – that sought to contain him, Welles, ever the maverick, struggled to make films with the money he earned as an actor working on a mindbogglingly diverse slate of projects in various parts of the world. Nevertheless, also freed from many restrictions, Welles managed to create a remarkably cohesive, if somewhat piecemeal body of work across the United States and various parts of Europe that consistently explored his favourite themes, and that, although often through necessity, pushed the boundaries of filmmaking practice.
Many of the films Welles made after his initial stint in Hollywood – ostensibly launched by the celebrated but divisive Citizen Kane in 1941 and ending with the relatively low budget Macbeth made for Republic Pictures in 1948 – were pieced together over extended periods of time, favour a collagist, almost experimental approach to pulling a film together, and often exist in multiple versions or were never fully completed. But, as critic David Thomson claims, Welles’ “is the greatest career in film, the most tragic, and the one with the most warnings for this rest of us”.
This is all true, to a degree, but we also need to fully celebrate what Welles did produce – and it is an extraordinary body of work across the fiction feature, shorts, television, documentary, the essay film and various other forms – and what this often artisanal, adaptive, opportunistic and cumulative approach to filmmaking enabled Welles to achieve. We often think of Welles as a great symbol of American showmanship, inventiveness and hubris – and also inevitable ruination (both of career and physical being) – but we also need to recognise that much of Welles’ creative life was spent outside the United States and takes in many of his greatest films like The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (1966) and F for Fake (1973). In many ways, he is amongst the greatest of international filmmakers, but one who moves in the opposite direction of filmmakers like Lubitsch, Wilder, Lang, Forman, Polanski, and many others.
So where does Welles’ baroque, late film noir opus, Touch of Evil (1958), fit into this career and his incessant movement between the United States and Europe? Although Welles had worked as an actor in American films and television throughout the 1950s, he was largely situated in Europe during that decade, and Touch of Evil was the first film he had directed in Hollywood for 10 years. He was initially contracted to only appear as the truly outsized Hank Quinlan in a film set to star Charlton Heston, to be made by Universal Pictures and to be produced Albert Zugsmith, a figure largely known for making highly successful genre exploitation films – one of which, Jack Arnold’s Man in the Shadow (1957), had recently featured Welles in a lead role. Zugsmith had also produced Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece, Written on the Wind in 1956, an equally baroque and fetid film that holds many parallels with Touch of Evil, including its incessantly pumping oil wells, corrupt and decadent setting, and bravura cinematography by Russell Metty. The tracking shots in both films are indeed extraordinary.
Of course, you’ll be introduced to this aspect in the famous opening shot of Touch of Evil. This long take dextrously crosses the porous border between Mexico and the US and helps stake the film’s claim as the greatest of all border noirs (a particular subgenre which also takes in films like Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse [1947] and Anthony Mann’s brutal Border Incident [1949]) as well as its status, in some ways, as a film for our time. But watch out also for the later, more gently extraordinary long take, captured in an interior interrogation scene that never draws attention to itself but highlights the equally claustrophobic potential of this technique.
Touch of Evil is a film of lonely open spaces and fetid, detritus strewn streets and sewers, but it is also marked by a sense of paranoia, claustrophobia and the deeply embedded racism of such heightened and routinely corrupt and corpulent, swollen border towns. In this regard, it is very much ahead of its time even though it features Charlton Heston, Mercedes McCambridge (in a fully committed, uncredited performance by the fortysomething actor as a youth gang leader), and Marlene Dietrich (brilliantly and indelibly) playing Mexican characters. In the process, it leans into many pungent and confronting stereotypes. The sad, melancholy, brilliantly written and endlessly quotable scenes between Dietrich and Welles also give the film the sense of a farewell to a certain kind of cinema. You can see and feel the existential toughness and battle-weary camaraderie of the two actors that is never completely weighed down by the highly prosthetic roles they have to play. Also, watch out for one of Welles’ greatest essays on male friendship and betrayal in the relationship between Welles’ Quinlan and his fellow cop, Menzies, movingly played by Joseph Calleia.
Welles was subsequently brought on to also direct and rewrite the film – according to several reports – at the suggestion of Heston, though he certainly didn’t demand control over the final cut and plainly didn’t get it. In later life, Welles suggested that Touch of Evil could have been the start of a second stint in Hollywood and that he deeply regretted this missed opportunity – particularly in light of Touch of Evil’s elevation to the status of one of the great American films of the 1950s – but it’s hard to see him successfully working within such a system while trying to balance his restless creativity and mercurial stardom (which kept him on the move for much of his career). If this had happened, we may also never have had such brilliant subsequent films as The Trial and Chimes at Midnight, and the legend of a Touch of Evil itself might have been diminished (and who would want that).
Although set on the Mexico-US border – probably inspired by Tijuana where Welles wanted to shoot – the film was shot between mid-February and early April 1957 in Venice, California. This was supposedly at the suggestion of Aldous Huxley, although the lack of clear distinction between fact and legend is another key aspect of the film and its legacy. Welles initially worked on the complex editing of the film, but was pulled away by acting commitments and initial work on his never to be completed Don Quixote in, somewhat ironically, Mexico. Despite the producers initially being very happy with the dailies they were reportedly dismayed by the form the film had taken and its squalid, even rancid portrait of environment and character (despite fairly clear moral lines). As with many of Welles’ most feted films, it was re-edited several times, new expository scenes were shot (clearly not filmed by Welles and/or Metty) and Welles was dismayed by the results. Before being locked out of the studio – essentially – he fired off a 58-page memo that identified changes he thought needed to be made to this “preview version, “save” the picture, and bring it back closer to his initial vision.
These were ignored and, unsurprisingly, the film was further edited down from what is now called the “preview version” and unceremoniously released as a 96-minute “potboiler” as part of a double feature (at least initially in the US). It did achieve some success on international release and was, of course, unleashed into the growing cult of Welles admirers who were rapidly elevating Citizen Kane to its status as the “greatest film of all time” and putting forward the director as the great symbol of the crucified artist at the hands of base commerce, often known as Hollywood (though even the more sober initial critical response in the US often noted its bravura elements).
In the years since in its initial release – and that lean version at 96 minutes was the one I fell in love with when first seeing the film on TV, initially, sometime in the 1980s, and I still like the most (I know that’s “wrong”) – Touch of Evil’s reputation and circulation has grown. Often seen as one of the “holy grails” for film archivists, the compromised “preview version” was discovered and distributed in the 1970s before the studio decided – with some persuasion, in the late 1990s – to attempt to re-edit the surviving materials using Welles’ 1957 memo as a guide. This version went on to become regarded as the definitive version of the film – as Welles never completed his own cut – and restored many elements that the director thought essential (although I miss Henry Mancini’s wonderful score over the opening shot, Welles’ intention to use ambient sound and various found music sources is equally brilliant if not exactly culturally precise). In some ways, Touch of Evil is the model and example for so much film archaeology that has followed and is a perfect illustration of the need for film history and stellar events like Cinema Reborn. It also feels like a clear inspiration for movies as diverse as A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night(2014), Psycho (1960) and Chinatown (1974). Seep into Orson Welles’ wonderfully decadent, often darkly comic, a little rancid, brilliantly lived in, and always extraordinary, Touch of Evil.
