Learning on ScreenTouch of Evil
2011. GB. Blu-Ray (Region B). Eureka ‘Masters of Cinema’. ‘Preview Version’ (109 minutes), ‘Theatrical Version’ (96 minutes), ‘Reconstructed Version’ (111 minutes) + extras. £19.99
About the author: James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. He is the author of nine books including The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939-1945 (I.B. Tauris, 1998), Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (I. B. Tauris, 2005) and War and Film (Reaktion, 2008). He is a Council member of IAMHIST and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
There has always been a tension within film studies between critics whose preference is for close analysis of the film text and historians who are often as interested in the story behind it as the film itself. Touch of Evil (1958) is the perfect example of why both approaches are necessary, and how they can enrich one another. The film text is the residue of the production process: the different creative agencies involved, the economic and artistic compromises, the interventions of the studio, or of censors, and so forth. Orson Welles’s career included many films that did not turn out as he wanted: the butchered release of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), for example, or the uncompleted film of Don Quixote. Touch of Evil – widely regarded as one of Welles’s three undisputed masterpieces alongside Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons – is another example of how the finished film is the outcome of social and industrial processes as much as the ‘vision’ of its director.
The relationship between film text and film history is brought sharply into focus by those films which exist in different versions. Take Napoléon (1927), for example: Abel Gance seems to have re-edited the film after many of its early screenings to the extent that even following its painstaking reconstruction by Kevin Brownlow we will probably never have a definitive version. On another level George Lucas has tampered with the first trilogy of Star Wars films by adding new footage with enhanced special effects and twice changing his mind about the cantina scene in the original film: does Greedo get off a shot before Han Solo shoots him? Here there is a tension between what we might call the ‘historic’ Star Wars – the film that made such an impact upon its release – and the ‘special edition’ that Lucasfilm now tells us is the definitive version. And Blade Runner (1982) – like Touch of Evil released in one version and followed by two different reissues – not only demonstrates how the entire meaning of a film can be changed by the addition of one small but significant scene but also provides a bizarre instance of a ‘director’s cut’ that the director had not approved.
Touch of Evil is another one of those films that problematises the notion of there being a definitive text. It provides a text-book example of why, when analysing any film, we should also take account of its production history. Following a rough cut completed at the end of 1957, Welles wrote a long memorandum (available as a PDF on the Eureka website: http://eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/welles-memo.pdf) suggesting changes, mostly to do with editing and music, some of which were incorporated into the ‘preview version’ of the film early in 1958. The version released in cinemas, however, was the studio’s cut, running some 13 minutes shorter than the preview but including retakes not shot by Welles. Even in this version Touch of Evil had a generally positive reception from critics. In 1975 the ‘preview version’, having been discovered in the studio va
ults, was released theatrically. This is the print that was shown on television for the next two decades and earned for the film a whole new generation of admirers. The ‘reconstructed version’ of 1998, which adds two minutes to the preview version, was an attempt to recreate the film according to Welles’s memorandum: the major change is having the opening tracking shot run without credits or music.
This new Blu-Ray release – the film has previously been available on Universal’s 2008 fiftieth anniversary DVD (Region 1) – is an essential resource as, for the first time, we have the three versions of the film available in excellent quality transfers. With the theatrical and reconstructed versions available in a choice of aspect ratios (Academy standard 1.37: 1 or ‘widescreen’ 1.85: 1), the Blu-Ray offers Touch of Evil in five possible variants. (The variance is because, while Universal had adopted 1.85: 1 as standard by the late 1950s, the composition of certain shots in the film would suggest that Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty were framing it in 1.37: 1, possibly with a view to future television screening.) These are supplemented by a highly informative booklet that includes production documents, notes on the different versions, transcripts of interviews with Welles recounting the making of the film, and reviews by Welles admirers André Bazin and François Truffaut. While the commentaries by stars Heston and Leigh (now both deceased) are valuable as historical records, those by film critics Naremore and Rosenbaum offer more insight into the film.
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.
