STACK #143 Sept 2016

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EXTRAS

(Mike) Vargas became a high ranking Mexican narcotics official, and

Welles was shown what they had done to his film, he was outraged and wrote a 58-page memo detailing his vision for the film. It was totally ignored and the film was released as a B-movie at the bottom of a double bill. This travesty was partly rectified 40 years later when the talented and Academy Award-winning editor Walter Murch, using Welles’s memo, reconstructed the film in an attempt to undo the damage the studio had done and realign it to Welles’s original concept. Its release in 1998 on DVD immediately enhanced the film’s reputation, so much so that it now regularly appears on various lists of best Hollywood films of the 20th century. Unfortunately, Welles was never allowed to direct another American movie. But to watch the restored version of  Touch of Evil – from its iconic opening three and a half minute single tracking shot, all the way through to its grisly finale –

Vargas’s wife Susan, played by Janet Leigh, was changed from Mexican to American. Whilst on their honeymoon, the couple witness a car bombing and become inextricably involved in a case of cross-border murder, racism, kidnapping and police corruption in the bloated shape of the unscrupulous Captain Hank Quinlan (an almost unrecognisable Welles in age make-up, a false nose, and carrying sixty pounds of body padding). Vargas is convinced that Quinlan has planted incriminating evidence to facilitate the arrest of a Mexican national for the double murder, and sets out to prove it. Quinlan is a deeply flawed character due to a traumatic incident in his past, and consequently now believes in justice by whatever means necessary. To impede Vargas’s investigation, Quinlan

Welles and Russell Metty (director of photography) line up a shot

When studio executives viewed Welles's cut of the film, they hated it and promptly fired him. They then proceeded to butcher the film

atmosphere where the underbelly of humanity is exposed within a world of omnipresent evil. The picture wrapped just one day over its 30-day shooting schedule and a few thousand dollars over budget. All of the cast and technicians involved in the picture were ecstatic with the result; Charlton Heston in particular, who wrote in his journal: “Orson Welles is the most exciting director I’ve ever worked for”. After Welles delivered the first cut of the movie to Universal, he took off for Mexico to scout locations for a film version of Don Quixote – a film he would never complete. When studio executives viewed Welles's cut of the film, they hated it and promptly fired him. They then proceeded to butcher the film, cutting out scenes and adding new connecting sections directed by a studio contract director. This removed the film’s latent tension, rendering the action confusing and difficult to relate to the plot. When

arranges with a local Latino crime boss to drug and brutally terrorise Susan in an abandoned motel. Welles was able to call upon a galaxy of stars, who were also personal friends, to make “guest appearances” in his movie. Zsa Zsa Gabor as the Madame of a strip joint, Joseph Cotton as a coroner, Ray Collins as the District Attorney, Mercedes McCambridge as a lesbian gang member, Dennis Weaver as a creepy and sexually repressed motel night manager (a precursor of the Norman Bates character in Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock two years later), and Marlene Dietrich (in her last great film performance) as a gypsy bordello owner and Quinlan’s former lover, Tana. With his baroque imagination in full flow, Welles reprised his Citizen Kane mis- en-scene – now deliberately played in the noir style. Using high and low camera angles (stunningly executed by cinematographer Russell Metty), innovative use of sound, and extensive use of low key lighting, Welles created a sinister and menacing

Poster for the restored version of Touch of Evil (1998)

perfectly illustrates the amazing artistry of Orson Welles as an influential filmmaker, and one who was simply 40 years ahead of his time.

SEPTEMBER 2016

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