11.5 Fragmentation and Decay 1952-8

 Fragmentation and Decay 1952-8

Attractions abound in the bordertown in Touch of Evil

READ THIS PAGE AFTER WATCHING TOUCH OF EVIL 

. . . this chapter must end with an analysis of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), which, although atypical of the 1950s, exemplifies the high point of the expressionist style that Welles himself inaugurated with Citizen Kane.

Touch of Evil's exteriors were shot on location in Venice, southern California, with its ersatz (artificial) veneer of European sophistication, decaying oil wells and sense of general decline. Venice becomes Los Robles, a border town, a liminal (transitional or threshold or boundary) space between Mexico and the United States, filled with detritus of all kinds, where right and wrong is ambiguous, and the boundaries between dream and waking, sanity and madness are constantly blurred. This ambivalence encompasses the principal characters. The American police captain, Hank Quinlan (Welles), who proceeds through hunch and intuition, is a corrupt racist, haunted by the murder of his wife, seeking solace with the Mexican whore Tanya (Marlene Dietrich). Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston), the Mexican narcotics agent, is upright, incorruptable, rational, yet powerless to prevent the abuse of his young American wife (Janet Leigh). The see-sawing battle between the two men provides the fulcrum for this shifting, restless exchange between two cultures, Latin and Protestant, between good and evil, civilization and libido.

YOUTUBE CLIP OF Touch of Evil (1958) Janet Leigh
The rape scene in the motel.
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Touch of Evil is a deliberately confusing, disorienting film and repeated viewings serve not to clarify confusion, but to appreciate the systematic ways in which Welles deliberately frustrates a desire for lucidity. At the center of the film is a calculated opacity (lacking transparency) as to whether or not Susan was actually raped by the teenage gang who descend on her isolated motel. In that terrifying scene we see, from her point of view, a group of glassy-eyed Latinos close in, including fish-eye closeup of the leader Pancho who flicks his tongue like a serpent which embodies a WASP culture's worst nightmare (Naremore, 1989, p. 164). Susan wakes to find herself in a seedy hotel room to see the pop-eyed, upside-down face of drug-dealer Grandi (Akim Tamiroff), strangled by Quinlan in another horrific encounter, which lolls hideously over the rail at the bottom of her bed.

YOUTUBE CLIP OF Touch of Evil (1958) Uncle Joe Grandi's End Scene
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Touch of Evil - Uncle Joe Grandi's End: Captain Quinlan (Orson Welles) kills Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) to tie up loose ends.

This sense of a waking nightmare is present throughout the film. The fluidity of the famous continuous crane shot that occupies the opening three minutes does not establish a clear sense of space, but rather a swirling, confused sequence of disconnected actions (the actual explosion happens off camera) whose only logic seems to be that they are typical of a border town where people move restlessly between two countries. Welles uses an extreme wide-angle lens throughout which distorts faces, especially in close-up, and buildings, making them seem unreal. Touch of Evil is both intensely claustrophobic, as in the interrogation of Sanchez; and agoraphobic as in the final scene where the jarring combination of extreme low- and high-angle shots create a sense of limitless darkness (Orr, 1993, p. 169). The deep-focus compositions often offer multiple objects of attention. At one point Vargas calls the motel to check on Susan's welfare. Not only is he placed off-centre in the frame dominated by the unseeing eyes of the blind woman who owns the shop where the telephone is located, but outside in the street a heated conversation between Grandi and Quinlan's loyal sidekick Menzies (Joseph Calleia) is clearly visible, and argument that could have important consequences, but which we never hear. Far from being 'ideal observers,' Welles makes his audience part of the pervasive miasma (a highly unpleasant smell) and confusion. The camera avoids any stable middle ground, which usually functions as a point of balance and adjustment for the viewer. Welles dispenses with master shots, reaction shots and his camera is continually restive without any static framing. Welles' rapid camera movements with a wide-angle lens makes the objects in the foreground seem to detach from the background and 'swim' past. Dissolves are never used, replaced by jarring cross-cutting or rapid montage. Although the action takes place almost entirely at night and uses low-key lighting frequently, with Quinlan in particular casting vast shadows of himself, it deliberately avoids the glamorous romanticism that chiaroscuro can possess in favor of a dingy look that gives the actors sallow faces and enforces the mood of corruption and decay. In several scenes, including Quinlan's murder of Grandi, the town's glaring neon lights flash on and off throughout the action, giving the brutal violence a hallucinogenic quality.

The closing scene, the mano-a-mano confrontation of Vargas and Quinlan, is shot from almost every conceivable angle except eye-level (avoided throughout the film) and makes no spatial sense whatsoever, as if it is still part of a nightmare. After Quinlan has shot Menzies, but has been wounded himself, his stumbling descent is shown in a tilted long-shot before a cut to an overhead medium shot when he falls backwards into the fetid, garbage-strewn waters that lie near the creaking derricks which keep pumping inexorably. 

As Vargas is reunited with Susan in a concession to bourgeois morality, the inscrutable, mystical Tanya utters Quinlan's enigmatic epitaph: 'He was some kind of man . . . What does it matter what you say about people?' This scene, with its nebulous and discordant melodrama, its grim absurdity and dark ironies - Vargas' ally Blaine arrives to tell him that Quinlan had been right all along about Sanchez - was the fitting culmination to a world of bewildering moral relativity. 

At the time of its release Touch of Evil was judged confusing and 'artsy.' Universal, already nervous about losses in the first half of 1958, gave the film little publicity or circuit bookings. Like film noir as a whole, its importance was first recognized in France - Touch of Evil enjoyed a two-year run in Paris in 1959-60 - but only gained recognition in America much more slowly. It has now become a cult masterpiece. A restored version of the 'director's cut' discovered in 1975, 12-minutes longer than the 95-minute version Universal distributed in 1958, has been re-released theatrically. Although, as I have demonstrated, Touch of Evil does not exhaust the varieties of the noir style, its baroque expressionism is the culmination of its most powerful version, the one through with the cycle is now remembered.

- Andrew Spicer, Film Noir pgs. 61-63