7AM FILM FEST: Touch of Evil (1958)

I've been taking advantage of this lull in my "career" to catch up with movies I've backlogged in my own personal DVD queue (whether via Netflix or movies I own).  After walking the dog, returning from a run or boot camp, I've been using the remaining early morning hours to watch a movie while the rest of the house sleeps.   I call it my 7AM Film Fest.  My fellow filmgoers are Bob, the cat, and Rita, the dog.

Orson Welles, Victor Millan, Joseph Calleia, and Charlton Heston

Recently I watched Touch of Evil (1958).  Orson Welles' strange, stylized, accidental, uber-noir classic about a crooked American cop, Hank Quinlan (Welles himself at his most bloated) in a tug-of-war with an idealistic Mexican federal investigator, Miguel "Mike" Vargas (Charlton Heston, defining upright, and in a 20th-century wardrobe) over the supposed guilt or innocence of a suspect and a murder trail that crosses back and forth between the US and Mexican sides of the fictional border town of "Los Robles."

According to legend, Welles was hired by the famous producer of exploitation quickies and crass noir programmers, Alfred Zugsmith, as an actor for the project.  Welles, hard up for cash as always and still in demand as an actor was taking almost any kind of job to fund his directorial projects, such as Othello, which he had been making exclusively in Europe for the past decade after Hollywood lost its faith in the troubled artist's ability to helm a major project.

Charlton "Chuck" Heston was riding high after several successful westerns and historical films and already an international star:  that Easter/Passover perennial, The Ten Commandments, was released the year before Touch of Evil went into production.  The lore also dictates that Chuck approached Zugsmith one day saying he had only signed on to do the project because he thought Welles--whose work he admired--was also going to direct it.  Pressured by his star, Zugsmith consented to hand the reigns of the project to the great Orson, making it the legend's first American film since his odd initial foray into cinematic Shakespeare on the Republic Studios B-Western lot, Macbeth in 1948.  Welles also did substantial work on the screenplay, which was based on the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson.

There's an alternative story that says Welles approached Zugsmith independently since he had done uncredited work for the producer, before.   But one likes to believe, and much of the film literature seems to agree, that it was Heston's insistence  that secured Welles the opportunity to make this film.  If so, Chuck is owed a debt of gratitude by film history.  One that almost excuses the big black moustache he wears in the film to help make him "Mexican."  Almost.

Fortunately, in a film that also features unbilled cameos by Joseph Cotton as a coroner, Mercedes McCambridge as a leather-jacketed Mexican lesbian, Zsa Zsa Gabor as a fishnetted "impesario" in a Mexican cabaret, Joseph Caillia as Quinlan's devoted patsy, and the great Russian actor Akim Tamiroff as a gross Mexican gangster, Chuck's role as a heroic Mexican lawman just adds to the peculiar off-kilter footing with which a viewer must walk this peculiar narrative.

One has to forget the loaded lightning rod of a figure Charlton Heston became in his last years.  (For what it's worth he was probably a "card-carrying liberal" or at least a Democrat at the time he made this film.)   He had just appeared in the first of his many iconic roles, as Moses with his staff dividing the Red Sea as his voice boomed above the waves.  The others: as Judah Ben-Hur racing a chariot in the Circus of Jerusalem; as Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar "El Cid" leading his troops out for the last time against the Moors in Valencia,  as Michelangelo struggling to complete the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,  and as astronaut George Taylor prostrate before the Statue of Liberty, were all to follow in just ten short years.

And if one's politics just can't abide Charlton Heston in anything but the cartoon role he made for himself with his alliance with the NRA, among other twilight conservative causes, I suppose one can excuse watching him here by making fun of him in this role, as others have, in numerous subsequent references to the film's odd quirk of casting.  

But don't feel too smug.  The script knowingly confronts the gringo by having Quinlan/Welles comment "he doesn't sound like a Mexican" and gives him strong ties to the US by virtue of his American wife, played by Janet Leigh (who is said to be from Philadelphia.)  Janet Leigh as Susie Vargas has the roughest time of anyone in this film:  she is accosted by her husband's enemies, kidnapped, exposed to heroin and "reefers" in an elaborate frame-up for murder, which all occurs in a nightmarish sequence in a remote motel in which she finds herself the solitary guest.

Needless to say, she probably should have known what she was getting into when she checked into the  the Bates Motel two years later.  You would think she would have known better.  The motel in Touch of Evil also boasts a mentally unbalanced (though as far as we can tell, not lethal) night manager in the presence of Dennis Weaver, on loan from TV's Gunsmoke.   At least he doesn't practice taxidermy. 

Despite Janet's rough night, she manages to look alluring, perversely never more so than in this part of the film.  Fragile as crystal porcelain, her skin, hair and brief night gown all seem of one color and she practically glows in the cinematography of Russell Metty, who had last worked with Welles on The Stranger (1946).  Eventually her hotel room is breached and she is rushed and manhandled by McCambridge and her thugs as the bulls invade the china shop. 

One does wonder what kind of salary her husband must be pulling down as Mexico's number one lawman to take her on a honeymoon to Los Robles, on either side of the Border.   Los Robles is actually Venice, California.  I don't know what the town looked like in real life when the film was made, but suitably dressed down and photographed in stark light and shadow it makes a fine border town circa 1958 and is almost an additional cast member.

Venice, CA, in 1913.  Not unlike how it looks in Touch of Evil

And in a movie of memorable, legendary cast members there is probably no one more iconic than Marlene Dietrich, who plays Tana, the fortune teller and madame of a brothel on the Mexican side and a former paramour of Quinlan.  When Quinlan shows up in her parlour, interrupting her bookeeping as the player-piano underscores the scene, she doesn't recognize him at first.  When he reminds her it's her Hank, she comments "you gotta knock off those candy bars."  Though only 41-years old when the movie was made, Welles looked much older and it was he who presumably put those words in her mouth, along with "You're a mess."  Lili Marlene also gets the last words about Welles in the film, as Hank Quinlan, falling dead into a abandoned, oil-soaked canal, flounders like an ancient mammoth corpse disgorged from the La Brea tar pits.  "He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?"

Adios.

Thus, also according to legend the film was taken away from Welles at the end of filming and "butchered" by the studios.   This may be too harsh an indictment however much we want to root for our artists in their battles with the Philistines.  Not that movie studios need any sympathy.  But Orson Welles was difficult to work with and notoriously mercurial in a business in which time is money and money is everything.   After seeing a rough-cut of the film (though some accounts say he never saw the final film) he wrote a 58-page memo detailing how the film should be cut to restore it to his personal director's vision.  The memo was ignored until 1998 when Walter Murch was asked to recut and restore the film, following the memo, to Welles' vision 13 years after his death.   

This is the version on DVD I saw most recently.  I've also seen the original cut that was in circulation for most of the film's post-history, the first time in Milwaukee, WI as part of the Oriental Theatre's then active revival program.

It was good then.  It is better now.  Some of the changes are subtle.  Some probably not possible in the time the film was released.  Moving the credits and Henry Mancini's opening theme music from the beginning to the end definitely improves the film, and allows one to savor the virtuosity of the famous 3 minute, 20 seconds opening shot, which has also been alluded to in subsequent works with almost as much irony as Charlton Heston's "Mexican."  But few films opened credit-less in 1951.

Not that it mattered.  The film was released by Universal-International, dumped onto the lower half of a double bill (below The Female Animal, starring Hedy Lamarr--which doesn't even warrant a Wikipedia page), and seen by virtually no one in the United States.  Welles was never to direct in America, again, continuing his practice of working in Europe, cobbling together intensely personal projects between alternating cameos in elephantine flops like Casino Royale (1967) and meatier roles such as Cardinal Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons (1966).  

Apparently the French and the Belgians liked the film, distinguishing Touch of Evil as the best film entered in the 1958 Brussels World's Fair Film Festival.  Two of the judges were future filmmakers Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.  Today it's considered one of the gems of Orson Welles' strange and troubled career.  

That's a strange case of critical evolution for the boy from Kenosha, WI, whose unmarked grave rests on a bullfighter's farm in Ronda, Spain.  When I was growing up, he was the the man who "back in the day" gave us Citizen Kane in film and The War of the Worlds on radio--both which we learned about in school--but who was better known to my generation for his appearances doing magic tricks with Johnny Carson and hawking cheap wine.  This 60's picture of a faded genius are now happily receeding into the past while the milestones that were ignored in their time, Othello, Chimes at Midnight, and Touch of Evil, have been raised to prominence.

Correctly so.  Those milestones were already being discovered and dissected by American film students as far back as 1975, when Welles received his AFI Life Achievement Award, but DVD's and cable televison have certainly expanded acquaintance with Welles' wider canon to an entirely new audience.

There's an unintended, latter-day fascination with Touch of Evil in light of the drug-inspired violence that now plagues many of the towns that straddle the border with our nearest southern neighbor.  Miguel Vargas' pride in the unguarded 1960 mile line separating his country from his wife's may drip with retrospective irony.  But though there are no beheadings in Touch of Evil, Los Robles looks like a rough town and the coroner's description of a victim of the car bomb that opens the film, as someone who could now be "drained through a sieve",  casts an even darker,  contemporary shroud over the shadow-play.