Charlton Heston, a Mexican-American lawyer, and his new wife, Janet Leigh, get mixed up in a gang murder in a border town. The chief detective is Orson Welles, full of his splendid self, excessively corpulent, and sporting a hawkish putty nose. He eats candy. ("It's either that or the booze," he rumbles in his commanding bass voice.) He dresses worse than Lieutenant Columbo. Oh, Heston may dash around a lot, seeking justice, and his wife may be threatened by pachucos and hypodermic-wielding lesbians, and there may be multiple uncredited cameos, and Dennis Weaver may turn in the performance of his life as an inn keeper with the animation of a jack-in-the-box but it's Welles' porcine presence that dominates in the film.
It's hard to know what to make of it. It's inexpensively made and, according to Heston, Welles could simply not bring himself to edit and put an end to it. The cinematic conventions of the 1950s were being deep sixed. The Nouvelle Vague was establishing itself in France. Welles' film, too, discards many of the triter movie conventions -- good hero, bad villain, coherent plot -- but it doesn't belong to any school of film, or even any genre. It's Welles' own.
There is a justifiably famous opening shot that shows us a bomb placed in car trunk. The camera then follows the car as it's driven around town, across the border, through crowded streets, until -- boom. The shot is a lengthy one and the camera rises up over rooftops and swoops slowly down for details.
Heston's alien lawyer is mostly ineffective. The law is in Welles' hands and he's an ambiguous figure. He's straight enough, for a small-town cop, but given to planting evidence without a qualm, and not above strangling a gangster who threatens to expose him.
Welles' "Citizen Kane" of seventeen years earlier was an undisputed masterpiece. How good is "Touch of Evil"? It's fascinating without being perfectly executed. It's the story of the downfall of a man who is gross and generally unpleasant, but whom we've come to know and even pity a little. It meanders all over the place and is often confusing as hell. Sometimes I didn't know which side of the border we were on. The dialog is functional but little of it is memorable. Welles grins slyly at Marlene Dietrich, an ex girl friend, and hints he might come back to "sample some more of her chili" sometime. ("You a mess, honey," she tells him.) Welles tells a suspect that after the explosion, "We found a shoe in the road. There was a foot in that shoe. We're going to make you pay for that, boy." If it had been made by someone else, a brand new director, it might have been hailed as an innovative first feature. Knowing it was made by Welles, who could add an enflourage to anything with his bag of tricks, it's a bit of a disappointment, despite its eccentricities and because of its longueurs.
I always enjoy watching it when it shows up on cable TV but I wouldn't enjoy multiple viewings too often. Compared to "Citizen Kane," which was prepared with infinite care, this looks like a pretty sloppy lash up. Maybe Orson Welles would have been better off if he hadn't made "Citizen Kane." Everything that came afterward seems a let down. And Welles, his apologists notwithstanding, didn't help matters much himself.
It's hard to know what to make of it. It's inexpensively made and, according to Heston, Welles could simply not bring himself to edit and put an end to it. The cinematic conventions of the 1950s were being deep sixed. The Nouvelle Vague was establishing itself in France. Welles' film, too, discards many of the triter movie conventions -- good hero, bad villain, coherent plot -- but it doesn't belong to any school of film, or even any genre. It's Welles' own.
There is a justifiably famous opening shot that shows us a bomb placed in car trunk. The camera then follows the car as it's driven around town, across the border, through crowded streets, until -- boom. The shot is a lengthy one and the camera rises up over rooftops and swoops slowly down for details.
Heston's alien lawyer is mostly ineffective. The law is in Welles' hands and he's an ambiguous figure. He's straight enough, for a small-town cop, but given to planting evidence without a qualm, and not above strangling a gangster who threatens to expose him.
Welles' "Citizen Kane" of seventeen years earlier was an undisputed masterpiece. How good is "Touch of Evil"? It's fascinating without being perfectly executed. It's the story of the downfall of a man who is gross and generally unpleasant, but whom we've come to know and even pity a little. It meanders all over the place and is often confusing as hell. Sometimes I didn't know which side of the border we were on. The dialog is functional but little of it is memorable. Welles grins slyly at Marlene Dietrich, an ex girl friend, and hints he might come back to "sample some more of her chili" sometime. ("You a mess, honey," she tells him.) Welles tells a suspect that after the explosion, "We found a shoe in the road. There was a foot in that shoe. We're going to make you pay for that, boy." If it had been made by someone else, a brand new director, it might have been hailed as an innovative first feature. Knowing it was made by Welles, who could add an enflourage to anything with his bag of tricks, it's a bit of a disappointment, despite its eccentricities and because of its longueurs.
I always enjoy watching it when it shows up on cable TV but I wouldn't enjoy multiple viewings too often. Compared to "Citizen Kane," which was prepared with infinite care, this looks like a pretty sloppy lash up. Maybe Orson Welles would have been better off if he hadn't made "Citizen Kane." Everything that came afterward seems a let down. And Welles, his apologists notwithstanding, didn't help matters much himself.