TOUCH OF EVIL (1998): A Great Civil Rights Film Free at Last
Written: Mar 10 '00 (Updated Mar 05 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Welles' most complete Hollywood film (excepting KANE); a striking early examination of Civil Rights.
Cons: We must forget botched versions; try to see Welles' vision fresh in Murch's restoration.
The Bottom Line: The 1998 restoration of TOUCH OF EVIL vaults it into the front rank of Welles' films. Shows unmistakable influence on PSYCHO (1960), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), LA CONFIDENTIAL (1996).
It took Orson Welles his entire adult life to create 1958's nightmarish TOUCH OF EVIL, and an additional 40 year struggle to realize the Civil Rights theme of the film. He did not live to see it restored to his vision, but, thanks to Editor Walter Murch (Restorations of APOCALYPSE NOW, 1991 and *VERTIGO, 1996), it now approaches *CITIZEN KANE (1941) as his most complete and complex Hollywood film.
Welles had been identified with Civil Rights themes long before the general public or government became aroused to this kind of injustice in American Society. From 1935, when the 20 year-old true Boy Wonder produced and directed a Harlem all-black adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, to the end of his life, Welles fought fascism in all its forms; and for the rights of minorities, women, and people of faith.
Let me mention but a few projects that lead up to his making of TOUCH OF EVIL:
In March 1941, following his earlier promotion of black artists, he directed the landmark Mercury Theater Broadway Production of Richard Wright's Native Son, starring Canada Lee (Banquo in his 1935 Macbeth). In April of that year, a month before the release of CITIZEN KANE, he wrote, directed and narrated a controversial radio play "His Honor -- The Mayor," about a Mexican Border political leader's fight against a racist, anti-union group: The White Crusaders. A week later, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to U.S. Attorney Mathew F. McGuire detailing Welles' activities and associations.
Hoover would also become interested in Welles' close relationships with Delores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and in the fact he married Latina Rita (Cansino) Hayworth in 1942.
That year Welles brought the marvelous Miss Horne with seminal Jazz Artists Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Hollywood, under contract, to work on a Jazz Segment for his proposed IT'S ALL TRUE.
This segment of IT'S ALL TRUE, I've recently learned, became the basis of an early mixed-race film NEW ORLEANS (Rubin, 1947), with Arturo de Cordoba (playing the proposed Welles part), Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Meade Lux Lewis, etc. (It has just now become available on Kino Video.)
While Director Norman Foster (JOURNEY INTO FEAR, with Welles, 1942) worked for him in Mexico on another segment of the project, MY FRIEND BONITO (never finished), Welles himself flew to Brazil to film two opening sections: one a history of the Samba, featuring a racially diverse cast; and a documentary about a group of revolutionary fishermen who sailed 1000 miles, entered Rio Harbor, and pleaded with Brazilian Dictator Vargas for economic reforms.
IT'S ALL TRUE was to be Welles' first use of technicolor, and although Nelson Rockefeller encouraged the project on behalf of the U.S. Government, the film never came together. It is the project that ended his autonomy in Hollywood, and dogged the rest of his career with charges that he was undisciplined, could not complete pictures. Welles reflected, years later, that his resolve to use people of color, some of them unknown, in key starring roles was completely unacceptable to the new management at RKO.
Welles' interest in Civil Rights and Freedoms did not abate, however, especially in radio, where he continued to feature Afro-American and Latin American themes.
In the summer of 1946, Welles became involved in two significant early Post-War Civil Rights incidents: "The Sleepy Lagoon Murder Case" in LA, and the beating and blinding of Black Naval Veteran Isaac Woodward, Jr, by police in South Carolina.
In the murder case, Welles acted as spokesman for 17 young Chicanos arrested and beaten for murder when a man was run over by a car. This is one of several incidents that form the basis of the police scandal early in LA CONFIDENTIAL (Hanson, 1998). In the second case, Welles used his radio commentary program to help bring to book a policeman who administered the beating to Naval Veteran Woodward, and to publicize the policeman's eventual sentencing to a year in jail for the atrocity.
Thirteen years later, on the Orson Welles Sketchbook (BBC-TV), May 7, 1955, Welles related Woodward's story and commented: "I am willing to admit that the policeman has a difficult job, a very hard job. But it's the essence of our society that a policeman's job should be hard. He's there to protect the free citizen, not to chase criminals -- that's an incidental part of his job." (An unconventional view, not often heard in media, and the basis for Welles interpretation of TOUCH OF EVIL.)
In 1958, returning to Hollywood to direct his last completed Hollywood film, with the help of Cinematographer Russell Metty (Welles, THE STRANGER, 1946), and with a first major musical score by Henry Mancini, Welles re-fashioned Whit Masterson's novel Badge of Evil to illustrate the above stated theme.
In TOUCH OF EVIL, a border town police captain, Hank Quinlan (Welles), is called to investigate a car explosion, which has killed a prominent citizen Rudy Linnaker and his mistress. Quinlan, as he has many times before, makes a quick assessment; in this case that a Mexican shoe clerk has committed the murder because he is romantically involved with the dead man's daughter. Quinlan then sets about, also as he has done before, to manufacture the circumstantial evidence that will complete his case.
His efforts are complicated by the unexpected presence in Los Robles of Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston), a narcotics investigator from Mexico City, who is mixing business with a honeymoon. Vargas' professional zeal separates him from his bride (Janet Leigh) after the explosion. She innocently becomes enmeshed in Border criminal politics and is kidnapped, taken outside the town to a motel (managed by Dennis Weaver, his first memorable film role), where she suffers indignities at the hands of Mercedes McCambridge and others (prefiguring a more serious problem she stumbles on in Hitchcock's PSYCHO, two years later).
The plot is very complicated, and after Welles completed the film, Universal Studios previewed a 120 minute long cut, tore the film apart and put it together again with retakes that made it no less complicated but quite illogical. Welles was denied permission to shoot any of these changes, and one Harry Keller finished the film (and is given directing credit by Epinions for the 1958 version)
Welles, after seeing the Studio version once, wrote a 58 page memo pleading for revisions.
Welles wanted to emphasize the difficulties that police experience in their work and personal lives by contrasting the situations of both Quinlan and Vargas. He wished to cross-cut the lure and repulsion Quinlan felt for his life in Los Robles with a not unsimilar pull that tore Vargas from his young wife and made him somewhat indifferent to her feelings and plight.
Welles' suggestions were ignored, and the film was put out on the lower half of double bills at 95 minutes.
Years later, following Welles' death in 1985, in the face of increased criticism, a third version of the film was issued, combining the first two cuts in a 108 minute edition. This film was welcomed as an improvement but left questions about Vargas' motivation, and the point of the story still unclear.
In 1998, the distinguished editor Walter Murch was able to gather together (except for two Welles' shot car scenes of Vargas and his wife) all the original footage. Using the 58 page memo as a guide, Murch reconstructed the film, and its sound track, to realize Welles' vision as nearly as possible.
The result is a work closer in length to the 1958 long cut but making much clearer Quinlan's soul destroying corruption and the racist roots for it, as well as a corresponding corruption of the younger Vargas, which prompts him to neglect his wife and himself collect illegal evidence in solving the case, as he sees it. The key role of Menzies (Joseph Calleia), Quinlan's enabler, is brought into focus. Significant cameos by Mercury regulars Joseph Cotton, Ray Collins, and Harry Shannon are pointed up. The important relationships of Quinlan with Crime Boss Grandi (Akim Tamiroff), and with his old Gypsy brothel-keeping girlfriend (Marlene Dietrich), are clarified.
Welles' desire to have the sound track emphasize natural sound and found music is realized. (Sound tracks, strangely, are the greatest weakness in later Welles' films.)
A final irony, revealed ambiguously at the end of this TOUCH OF EVIL, is that Quinlan may have gotten the right man after all, but in a flawed investigation, supported by bogus evidence.
In LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997), originally meant to span the years 1953 to 1958, Writer/Director Curtis Hanson included a parody of TV's Dragnet. It was called not Badge of Evil but Badge of Honor. That, too, is a conscious irony, as Hanson has acknowledged.
Be sure to see the 1998 version. (You will only wonder at how butchered the other three TOUCH(es) OF EVIL must have been!)
Some critics call it the last true (black and white) film noir.
UPDATE . . . UPDATE . . . UPDATE: OCTOBER 21, 2000. This month the DVD of the restored TOUCH OF EVIL has been released with commentary and a documentary featuring Curtis Hanson (LA CONFIDENTIAL). Recommended.
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Complete, uncut and restored to Orson Welle s vision set in a squalid Mexican border town, Welles, as the corrupt and bogoted small-town police chief,...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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