Learning on ScreenTouch of Evil
However, the complex history of the film would be of merely academic interest were it not such a rich text in itself. In all its variants Touch of Evil is a visual tour de force that superbly demonstrates Welles’s mastery of film style and technique. This is most evident in the fragmentary mise-en-scène – the acute camera angles, deep shadows, intense close ups, extreme wide angles and the prowling camera tracking shots – that creates a disorienting and nightmarish atmosphere. Indeed parts of the film are open to being read as a nightmare rather than as ‘real’ events, notably the pivotal scene where newly-wed Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh) is terrorised in a motel room by a motorycle gang. The film is ambiguous as to what happens to her: whether she is raped, or forcibly injected with heroin, or both. Some commentators – such as Robert B. Ray in his book A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton University Press, 1985) – have argued that the power of Touch of Evil rests in its visual style rather than its plot, which he describes as a ‘tawdry melodrama’. Repeated viewings, however, bring home the degree to which narrative and visual style are complementary aspects of a coherent formal system. The recurring motif of Touch of Evil is crossing boundaries: between law and vice, sanity and insanity, reality and nightmare – even its location is a town on the US/Mexican border. This is more than a tawdry melodrama – it is an exploration of power and corruption that refuses to compromise with an easy resolution or happy outcome. The boundaries are constantly blurred: Hank Quinlan (an excellent performance by Welles demonstrating that he could curb his excesses under a strong director, i.e. himself! ) is simultaneously a vile racist monster and a man tormented by the death of his wife, while the insistence of the morally upright Ramon Vargas (Heston) on investigating crime rather than enjoying his honeymoon is arguably responsible for the escalation of the violence that follows – including the ordeal of his wife who at the crucial moment he is unable to protect.
What is the historical significance of Touch of Evil? It has often been seen as the last great example of film noir, marking the end of a movement that had begun in the early 1940s and to which Welles had already made an important contribution with The Lady from Shanghai (1948). To some extent Touch of Evil represents a pair with The Lady from Shanghai, similarly a free adaptation of a source novel with an ambiguous and dreamlike quality. Yet Touch of Evil strikes me less as the end of one movement than the beginning of another. It is easy to see how Welles influenced the nouvelle vague directors in France, especially Truffaut, and how New Hollywood auteurs would find inspiration from his struggles with the studio system. Touch of Evil seems to anticipate the police and detective films of the 1970s such as William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Those films have been seen as marking a revival of film noir in a decade when American cinema was more receptive than ever before to the exploration of political corruption and narrative ambiguity. How appropriate, then, that the 1970s saw the first ‘rediscovery’ of Touch of Evil.
James Chapman is Professor of Film at the University of Leicester.
