11.0 The Last Classical Noir?

OVERVIEW -- The Last Classical Noir?

Captain Quinlan questions dancers in a club, Touch of Evil (1958)


TOUCH OF EVIL YOUTUBE CLIP
Link Here

The New York Times Clip:
A. O. Scott looks back at Orson Welles's thriller set
on the border between Mexico and the United States.

Transcript: 

Touch of Evil – the Critic’s prick nyt 

You folks are American citizens. I am yes. Where were  you born? Philadelphia name is Vargas. There's a lot of talk these days about securing the border between the US and Mexico. That's the geographical setting of Orson Welles is Touch of Evil, a movie that's very skeptical about the very idea of fixing any kind of boundary, political, moral, psychological, spiritual. It's very difficult to tell symbolically or literally what side anybody is on.

A bomb is planted in a car in Mexico. It explodes in the United States, just across the border. Too lawmen head up the case on the American side There's Captain Hank Quinlan, played by a corpulent Orson Welles. On the Mexican side, there's narcotics. Officer Mike Vargas, played by Charlie Heston. And trust me, once you get past that, make up. It's a very persuasive performance. One of Heston's best.

What about Quinlan sergeant? What's he done? What about all those people he put in a death house? Save your tears for them.

Each of these men is attached to a woman. Vargas' wife Susie, played by Janet Leigh, is an emblem of wholesomeness in a world of rottenness and corruption. I'm free. Free?. Nobody was holding your, keeping you missing. Quinlan keeps occasional company with a local Madam, played someone improbably, but with great Teutonic glamour by Marlena Dietrich.

 I heard the explosion. Well, when this case is over and come around tonight. Sample some of the chili. 

Better be careful. Maybe too hot for you.

 all of the performances in this movie, including these four major ones, are fleshy and real. And that's a hallmark of Welles distinction as a director. 

Like what happens? My brother Vic is just as good as convicted. 

He got his start in the theater where he learned to use whatever actors he had in the service of his own vision. His virtuosity as a visual artist is on display in this movie as well. Wells uses extended takes and inventive camera movements to tie the action together. He shoots his actors from low angles and in claustrophobic group close up.

Exterior sequences he captures chaotic motion with elegance and control, as in the movies justly famous opening scene, a single 3 1/2 minute tracking shot. In spite of this amazing artistry, in spite of Wells, explicit wishes spelled out in a 58 page memo to the studio, Universal took the movie away from him, recut it, reshot part of it, and released it as a B movie at the bottom of a double bill. 

This travesty was partly rectified 40 years after the initial release. Of Touch of Evil. When the Great film editor Walter Murch recut the film trying to bring it into alignment with Wells stated intentions. This new version enhanced the film's reputation and restored some of the power and subtlety that we associate with Orson Welles. 

You've been reading the cards haven't you? I've been doing their accounts. Come on, read my future for me. You haven't got any. 

Orson Welles was larger than life, and so were the characters in place. They could be tragic, heroic, even grotesque, but they were never simple. Like many of Shakespeare's characters, they were compounded of different, sometimes violently contradictory qualities. But you can't separate those qualities. You can't build a fence between good and Evil. we all live on both sides of that border. We always have



LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

1.Describe stylistic and thematic elements of noir and how they are utilized to heighten social
   critique of American policing, dirty cops and vehement racism in the late 1950s

2.Identify and assess Orson Welles' and Russel Metty's unique contributions in regards to noir
   elements of lighting, characterization, theme, mood and tone in Touch of Evil.

3. Assess Touch of Evil (1958)


TO-DO LIST

To meet the objectives of this module, you will complete the following activities and assessments:

1.Read module material and "The Borderlands of Touch of Evil"  (Downloaded a PDF) from
   Noir Anxiety by Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo

2.Watch Touch of Evil and clips

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