Touch of Evil

Touch of Evil

Opening Shot

A bomb is placed in a car trunk. The car drives through the streets of a border town. A couple crosses the same streets on foot. Russell Metty's camera follows both in a single unbroken take that lasts three minutes and eighteen seconds, crossing the US-Mexico border twice, weaving through traffic and pedestrians, building tension toward an explosion you know is coming but can't predict. The take ends with the blast. Welles opens with the most technically ambitious sequence in American noir and then spends the rest of the film detonating the genre's moral certainties.

What It Does

Metty's photography turns the border town into a labyrinth of angles and shadows. Every composition is slightly off-center, slightly tilted, as if the world itself is crooked. Welles uses low angles that make Hank Quinlan (Welles himself, wearing prosthetics that added sixty pounds) loom over every frame like a monument to corruption. The Mexican motel sequences are shot in near-darkness, with light sources visible and harsh, creating an anxiety that's as much visual as narrative.

Henry Mancini's score is all Latin jazz and jukebox bleed. The music comes from within the scenes (bars, radios, street musicians) more often than from outside them, which grounds the noir atmosphere in a specific place rather than a generic mood. The famous player piano in the motel, playing by itself in an empty room, is the film's most unsettling sound cue.

Welles's performance as Quinlan is a masterpiece of self-destruction played as self-righteousness. He plants evidence because he "knows" who's guilty, and the tragedy isn't that he's wrong but that he's sometimes right. Charlton Heston as Vargas, improbably cast as a Mexican narcotics officer, is the film's moral center by default, but Welles makes you understand Quinlan, which is worse. The film's sympathy is always slightly misplaced, always gravitating toward the corrupt man because the corrupt man is more interesting.

Why It's on the List

Touch of Evil was dumped by Universal on a double bill, re-edited against Welles's wishes, and ignored for decades. The restored version, assembled from a 58-page memo Welles wrote to the studio, is now recognized as the last great film noir and one of the most technically accomplished American films of the 1950s. Welles proved, one more time, that he could make a studio picture on a small budget that operated at a level of formal ambition the studio didn't understand. The opening shot alone influenced Altman, Scorsese, De Palma, and every filmmaker who ever thought a single take could tell a story.

The Argument Against

Charlton Heston in brownface as a Mexican official is the film's most dated element, and it's unavoidable. The casting was problematic in 1958 and is indefensible now. The plot mechanics (the frame-up, the gang involvement, Grandi's schemes) are more convoluted than compelling, and the middle section sags under subplots that Welles seems less interested in than the Quinlan material. The film's reputation rests heavily on its formal innovations, which can overshadow the fact that the story itself is fairly standard crime melodrama.

Closing Image

Quinlan lies dead in the water. Tanya (Marlene Dietrich) looks down at him. "He was some kind of a man," she says. "What does it matter what you say about people?" She walks away. The camera holds on the body in the canal. The player piano is silent. The border town continues. The corruption continues. The water doesn't clean anything.