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jbhifi.com.auSEPTEMBER
2016
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stack.net.au(Mike) Vargas became a
high ranking Mexican
narcotics official, and
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
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
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
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 –
perfectly illustrates the amazing artistry of
Orson Welles as an influential filmmaker, and
one who was simply 40 years ahead of his
time.
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
Poster for the restored version of
Touch of Evil
(1998)