Touch of Evil is a film that has never been off of my top-ten favorite films list since I first saw it in the late 80s. I’ve seen it dozens of times and I’ve always found it an endless source of pleasure on every level. It is exuberantly cinematic, with the quintessential maverick auteur Welles ensuring that every shot is not only compelling and stimulating, but meaningful to both story and theme. There is no evidence of Welles accepting the project as an inconsequential potboiler to be churned out for a quick paycheck, which is how most every other above-the-line participant regarded it. Whatever the budget, whatever the merits of the source novel, Welles, as usual, spun straw into gold even though no one in his orbit would notice or care. Universal-International had the film reedited after Welles turned in his cut, ignored his pleas to restore it, and then trotted it out on a double-bill with The Female Animal, as the bottom half of that bill, no less. In spite of all this, it won the top prize at the 1958 Brussels World Fair Expo, and subsequently ran in a Paris theater for several years straight. This was typical for Welles, who joked at one point, “They’ll love me when I’m dead;” he was always ahead of his time and in a mutual love-hate relationship with the film industry. An anomaly in its time, Touch of Evil bears nihilistic themes that would not be prevalent in movies until the 70s and stylistic elements that wouldn’t be common until even later. The film is a subtle critique of superstition and an aggressive critique of casual racism, police brutality and government corruption in general disguised as a fairly routine crime drama. Meanwhile, a wildly craning and careening camera never stops underscoring the aura of lunacy being acted out by a parade of eccentric and grotesque characters, including Akim Tamiroff as a sweating gang boss with a bad toupee, Mercedes McCambridge disguised as a narco, and a hilariously extrinsic Marlene Dietrich as a Mexican fortune teller. Welles’ familiar theme of betrayal between friends appears prominently. Another point of interest is the film’s bearing on Hitchcock’s Psycho, made two years later. Aside from sharing an art director, Robert Clatworthy, (responsible for the ornate, dusty knickknacks piled up in all of the interiors), and John L. Russell (camera operator on Touch of Evil and director of photography on Psycho, both films also present Janet Leigh being accosted in seedy motels located off of main highways; motels that happen to be run by lanky, repressed young loners (Dennis Weaver, Anthony Perkins, respectively). Even Mort Mills, the assistant D.A. in this film, returns as the traffic cop in Psycho. To my knowledge, no one involved with Psycho’s production ever acknowledged these debts, but they seem far too significant to dismiss. Most importantly, the very idea of a major auteur deliberately tackling a B-movie in order to show off his technical prowess free of Hollywood gloss, it seems to me, is something that Hitchcock could only have been drawn to because of Welles’ experience with Touch of Evil. All trivia and analysis aside, the simple fact is that Touch of Evil gives you no time to contemplate such things because it’s a breathtaking roller-coaster of flamboyant camerawork, editing, writing and production design. Its stark style and edgy story elements predate the Nouvelle Vague by a year. It’s the rare kind of film that can please a casual viewer just out for a good thriller, provide grist for scholars to chew over, inspire filmmakers, and delight all those who just love cinema.
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