Touch of Evil (1958) | Little White Lies

Touch of Evil (1958)

10 Jul 2015 / Released: 10 Jul 2015

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Orson Welles

Starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, and Orson Welles

A black and white image of a man comforting a woman lying in a bed, with a decorative light fixture visible in the background.
A black and white image of a man comforting a woman lying in a bed, with a decorative light fixture visible in the background.
4

Anticipation.

Orson Welles’ mangled masterwork is back in town.

5

Enjoyment.

Madness has never looked this soulful.

5

In Retrospect.

“An hour ago, Rudy Linnekar had this town in his pocket. Now you could strain him through a sieve.”

Orson Welles is some kind of a man in this gris­ly, ultra-melan­cholic bor­der-town noir from 1958.

To para­phrase François Truffaut’s obser­va­tions on Touch of Evil, Orson Welles cre­at­ed a char­ac­ter in cor­pu­lent Hank Quin­lan who is so unre­pen­tant­ly revolt­ing that we end up falling in love with him. He also cre­at­ed a char­ac­ter in Mike Var­gas (Charl­ton Hes­ton) – a dude who shoots so straight it hurts – that we end up despis­ing him.

It’s a film which flips con­cepts of hero­ism and vil­lainy on their respec­tive heads, devi­ous con­duct is nor­malised in a world plagued by cru­el­ty and injus­tice. Work­ing on base­less hunch­es, send­ing peo­ple to the gal­lows with a cer­ti­tude that comes nowhere near being beyond rea­son­able doubt, is how this crooked world turns. He was some kind of a man… What does it mat­ter what you say about peo­ple?” is the utter­ly dev­as­tat­ing final line spo­ken by cig­a­r­il­lo-puff­ing, pianola-play­ing clair­voy­ant Tana (Mar­lene Diet­rich), seal­ing this notion that peo­ple are too com­plex to be straight-jack­et­ed as the prod­ucts of their banal earth­ly actions.

Welles came aboard this film by acci­dent, rewrote it from scratch and then had the final cut tak­en from him. Even for the late 50s, when you had peo­ple like Samuel Fuller and Nico­las Ray mak­ing marked­ly weird movies, or at least weird riffs on nor­mal movies, Touch of Evil takes things to the baroque next lev­el. The gid­dy con­stel­la­tion of eccen­tric side play­ers and slum-like loca­tions coa­lesce to form a sto­ry that often comes across as con­trived. But it’s only by its tremen­dous, sur­re­al cli­max that you realise that this is pure char­ac­ter study and not some wan­ton­ly out­landish noir- thriller in which every­thing ties up in a neat bow.

It’s a film which pits intu­itive man against prag­mat­ic man, and ends up by deduc­ing that both lifestyles have their rel­a­tive strengths and weak­ness­es. Like the bomb that’s lobbed in the boot of the soft-top car in its open­ing scene, Touch Of Evil is a film where we can hear the faint sound of tick­ing in our heads, but don’t realise what the prob­lem is before it’s far too late.

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