A Very Orson Welles Christmas: Touch of Evil (Dir Orson Welles, 1h51m, 1958)

The memo is fifty-eight pages long. Orson Welles has written it in 48 hours; its subject is Touch of Evil, Welles' most recent directoral effort, which Welles has seen a workprint of on December 3rd 1957. Shot by shot, Welles is confronted with what Universal has, without permission, done to his film. These affront are two-fold: reshoots that have been added by Harry Keller, otherwise an editor of cowboy movies, who's had to cite clauses in the contracts of stars Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh to get them back onto set, and in the re-edits of the existing material by Virgil Vogel, Aaron Stell, and executive producer Ernest Nims, that's tried, quixotically, to make sense of what the studio regard as a confused mess of a picture. After this, Orson Welles will never work in Hollywood as a director again. Yet, Touch of Evil, in its depiction of the corruption of a Mexican-American border-town sherrif and his downfall via a bombing and subsequent arrival of a Mexican prosecutor, is Welles' noirish sensibilities honed to perfection, and only the end of the first chapter of the director's career.

Whit Masterson did not exist: the partnership of Robert Allison Wade and H. Bill Miller would churn out more than two dozen pulp novels, several of which were subsequently adapted into films. Most of them are unremarkable thrillers, two (1963's The Yellow Canary, script written by Rod Serling and 1967's Warning Shot,) are directed by Buzz Kulik and another is the luridly named Kitten with a Whip (1964). Badge of Evil, published in 1956, is another; it's a moderate success and studios begin to circle, including Universal (then Universal International), the rights eventually being bought by the studio with Albert Zugsmith, the self-styled "King of the Bs", producing. Zugsmith and Welles, famous for going over budget, seem an odd combination; Zugsmith, after all, was a master of making films on the cheap (his work aside from Touch of Evil include Invasion USA (1952), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and, as director and producer, Sex Kittens Go To College (1960).

Enter Charlton Heston; having read the script shortly after finishing work on Cecil B DeMille's remake of The Ten Commandments, (1956), Heston successfully lobbies Universal to let Welles, already playing Quinlan, to direct; Welles is a known quantity to Zugsmith, who has already produced Man in the Shadow, a western in which Orson plays a gleefully unpleasant iron-fisted rancher who essentially runs the local town. Being offered the chance to write the script for the film by Zugsmith, Welles has essentially been handed the reins of Badge of Evil, promptly casting a mix of Universal contracted players (Janet Leigh), western actors (Dennis Weaver, who plays a nervy hotel receptionist, was otherwise famous for appearing in TV series Gunsmoke), and Welles' friendgroup and Welles' old Mercury Company of actors (Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, the incredibly prolific Keenan Wynn), and for this film, Marlene Dietrich; this quartet will appear uncredited and working for standard union rates).

Welles is at the centre of Touch of Evil, both in front and behind the camera: his first, and most important act is to turn the novel into a critique of American relations with Mexico, moving the novel's action to the Mexican border (actually Venice, California, recommended to Welles by English writer,Aldous Huxley, who'd been living in the state since 1937), and renames Masterson's protagonist, Mitch Holt as Miguel Vargas (Heston). Arriving following a bombing, in which two people are killed, so Quinlan, the town's police captain, a recovering alcoholic who limps and needs a stick, and his fantically loyal assistant, Menzies (Joseph Calleia, idolised by Orson Welles as a young boy), attempt to pin the act on a young man. Quinlan is corrupt, Welles imbuing the cop with a nastiness, a physicality largely missing from Welles up to this point, a sleazy, jowly, cigar-chewing and often crude figure, whose racism against the Mexicans that inhabit his town only deepens across the film. Quinlan will also mark the end of Welles' Hollywood career as an on-screen actor for a considerable time, mostly appearing from this point onward in British, French, and Italian pictures, or as an unseen-and often uncredited-narrator.

To complicate matters, Vargas also arrives on honeymoon with his wife, quickly uncovering the man is married to the victim's daughter, and that Quinlan may have planted sticks of the same dynamite used in the bombing in a previously empty shoebox, whilst the shadowy figure of Joe Grandi (the veteran actor, Akim Tamiroff)'s gang of young men, separately being investigated by Vargas, also make their presence felt, attempting to kill the prosector, whilst the arrival at the motel where his wife (Leigh) is staying, with plans to ensnare her in narcotics, and the neurotic form of Weaver giving these sequences a claustrophobic sensibility; it's hardly surprising that no less than Alfred Hitchcock would regard its unnerving sensibility and the neurotic motel owner an influence on Psycho (1960, which would of course, feature Janet Leigh).

But where Welles is at his most towering, at perhaps the summit of noir film-making is in how the film looks; whilst much of this is down to Russell Metty's cinematography, (he would win an Oscar three years later for Spartacus (1960), and much aided by the fact that the camera could now be moved handheld, there is still a decidedly Wellesian sensibility to just how daring the film is in its camerawork. Look no further than the opening four minute unbroken tracking shot, in which we travel from bomb being planted in the back of a car, through the streets of the town, past Vargas and his wife, through border security, before detonating and killing two people. It not only sets the scene for the film, and its central mystery, but is Welles, once more, revolutionising cinema: the techniques in the sequence are commonplace in modern cinema, and groundbreaking here. But Welles goes further: the cinematic language of the noir is heightened, taken to spectualar, tottering grandeur; the angles are even more extreme, even more off-kilter, the shadows longer, and starker. Welles' Quinlan does not so much appear as loom into shot, whilst the shots of the motel are distorted and dreamlike.

Thus, the film begins to focus on this interplay, this tension, between Quinlan, Vargas and Grandi, that will drive the rest of the film, Grandi tempting Quinlan back to drink, whilst blackmailing Vargas' wife; the scenes with Grandi and one, if not both of his foils are among the film's best. It is in the disintegration of this trio, as the film barrels towards its showdown, that shows Welles' quality as an actor; Quinlan seems increasingly detached from the narrative around him; drunk, he drifts back to his old watering hole, run by Tana (Dietrich), and here, that sense of tired desperation, that sense of an entire era of cinema ending behind the lens, flows onto the screen. As Tana, instructed to read the cards, intones: "Your future's all used up", so the line between Quinlan and Welles begins to blur; it may have seemed to Welles that he truly did have no future in American cinema.

Yet, arriving at the 1958 Brussels World Film Festival, to which Touch of Evil was unwillingly entered by Universal, so Welles is gratified to be awarded not only International Critics Prize, but a prize for the film's cast. To consider Welles' career as "over" is to discount another two and a half decades of film making, including The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (1966) and F is for Fake (1973), as well as acting stints in A Man For All Seasons (1966), Catch 22 (1970) and Waterloo (1970), to name but dozens of films, adverts, cameos, voiceovers, and walk-on parts to which that inimitable growling baritone can only be Orson Welles. To discount the second half of Welles' career-or indeed anything after Kane is to discount a director unfairly sidelined by Hollywood, whose work is even now returning to the light through the work of Criterion and writers like myself who have championed the wunderkind from Los Angeles all along, the tireless work of wellesnet.com and other film websites to give an encyclopedic coverage of the afterlife of Welles, the dogged, forty-year attempts by a small army of editors, directors and Welles' estate to bring The Other Side of the Wind, arguably Welles' unfinished masterpiece, to release, and thousands of filmgoers, like you and me.

This is not to mention the ongoing hunt for the Magnificent Ambersons, reportedly somewhere in Brazil, and Simon Callow's three (soon to be four) part biography of a man that, far from fading from view since his death in 1985, is more vital, more alive, more important in the history of cinema, that we may ever be able to reckon with; Welles is a mad genius, a faded star, an influence to rappers, and voice actors, to film-makers and writers. Orson Welles is more than Citizen Kane but stood forever in its shadow, a cautionary tale and an ultimately triumphant one, of a man who never stopped fighting to make and release films. As for that memo; in 1998, Walter Murch, otherwise known for sound and editing work on Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Godfather Trilogy, would re-edit the film following Welles' memo, line by line. His subsequent restoration is now the definitve version of the film, Touch of Evil, at last restored to be Welles' final word on noir, and his farewell to Hollywood. What a farewell it is.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Touch of Evil is available via streaming on Apple TV, and on DVD and BluRay from Eureka Entertainment.

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