It’s been eight years since Orson Welles’ noir masterpiece Touch of Evil made a splash in Blu-ray, through Universal. It’s returned in 4K Ultra HD, something guaranteed to grab the attention of many a film fan. As that was three months ago, this review falls under the heading of old news. But I thought I had a pretty good handle on the mini-controversies around the three versions prepared, first for DVD in 2008 and then in 2014 on BD.
Which is the ‘best’ version of this Albert Zugsmith production? Which is closest to Orson Welles’ ‘original intentions?’ Does the 1998 reconstruction/re-edit/revision deliver a definitive version?
Orson Welles’ major studio directing career lasted only seventeen years. His final studio film was a work-for-hire job obtained through the intervention of actor Charlton Heston. Welles directed Touch of Evil brilliantly, applying more sheer cinematic excitement than in any of his movies since his Citizen Kane. But he lost control of the movie in the editorial stage. Universal saw little value in Touch of Evil, and tossed it away in release, where it often played on the bottom of double bill bookings.
Yet the show was eventually hailed as one of the director’s top masterpieces. It has survived in three distinct versions. The theatrical version (96 min.) is what premiered on May 7, 1958, as part of a double bill of ‘Bold! Frank! Startling!’ adult dramas. The longer preview version (109 min.) was only ‘discovered’ in 1972, when Bob Epstein of UCLA screened the show in our film class and found that even Universal didn’t know they had sent a rare alternate cut. Epstein told us that it had never been seen outside the studio, that it wasn’t even ‘on the books.’ Universal didn’t officially acknowledge the preview version until 1976.
The third cut of Touch of Evil is the well-publicized 1998 reconstructed version (111 min). When he was thrown off the movie, Welles wrote a painfully worded 58-page memo in an attempt to be allowed to continue working. Welles pleads for the studio to not butcher his labor of love: “I must ask that you open your mind for a moment to this opinion from the man who, after all, made the picture.” Producer Rick Schmidlin and editor Walter Murch used that memo as their bible when attempting to return the film to a form closer to Orson Welles’ intentions.
Orson Welles had plenty of previous experience losing creative control of his film work. All of his Hollywood pictures after Citizen Kane suffered serious studio interference. Most fans know about the wholesale trashing of The Magnificent Ambersons, which by all accounts may have been an even greater achievement than Kane. Welles’ The Stranger lost a lengthy prologue showing O.S.S. agents tracking a Nazi zealot through South America. The ambitious noir thriller The Lady from Shanghai underwent a major reworking. Columbia nixed the director’s interesting soundtrack ideas and dictated re-shoots. It now seems insane that any film studio would interfere with any of these films. The quality common to of all of them is directorial brilliance.
Touch of Evil is a pulp thriller adapted from a lower-case crime novel about a Rogue Cop with an emphasis on racial tension. The examination of a seedy border town gives us a parade of lurid scenes suggesting drug use, potential rape and numerous craven vices. A bomb blows up the convertible of American construction millionaire Rudy Linnekar (Jeffrey Green) and his girlfriend Zita (Joi Lansing). Mexican vice detective Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) is a witness, and is forced to investigate. American police chief Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) proceeds to frame the most likely suspect — his frequent modus operandi. Meanwhile, Miguel’s new bride Susie (Janet Leigh) is terrorized by the Mexican Grandi mob. Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) hopes to frighten Vargas into calling off an investigation into his family’s criminal activities. Quinlan and Grandi have come to an understanding based on mutual interest: both are threatened by the Mexican cop Vargas.
The first wave of film noir criticism tagged Touch of Evil as the final film in the first, original noir cycle. Its mix of menace and disillusion fits right in with the most rigorous noir definition. Never settling for half measures, Orson Welles transcends the noir style with his generous application of expressive visual fireworks: distorting lenses, swooping cranes, eccentric blocking and intricate tracking shots. Half the movie is clipped montage and the other half gliding camera moves.
Three of Welles’ most impressive cinematic set pieces are present. Two long scenes in the apartment of Rudy Linnekar’s daughter Marcia (Joanna Moore) sustain our interest for several minutes without a cut — and without letting our attention wander to thoughts of technique for its own sake. The first scene in the apartment choreographs 19 separate reposition cues for both the actors and the camera. For elegant scene blocking, it’s one of the most praised dramatic scenes ever.
Producer Albert Zugsmith, Orson Welles and Jack Arnold got along well enough on Man in the Shadow. Did Universal and Zugsmith perhaps think they could tame the notorious filmmaker? The creative whirlwind Welles seems to have paid little attention to ‘how things were done’ at Universal in 1958. His casting of Charlton Heston amuses people that think that all Mexicans must look and sound like Pedro Gonzales-Gonzales. Heston plays the incorruptible policia with his dependable gutsy conviction. He’s definitely wearing brown-face makeup, which is not at all offensive. Seeing Heston try to give Miguel Vargas a stock accent or gestures would have been offensive. Would Ricardo Montalbán have worked as well? Five years later, Sam Peckinpah slipped an inside joke about this into a dialogue line in his Major Dundee:
James Coburn, to Charlton Heston:
“If I were you I’d stay off the streets amigo.
You make an unlikely lookin’ Mexican.”
Janet Leigh provides a ‘touch of normalcy’ as the rather naïve Philadelphia wife of a Mexican vice cop. We film students noted Leigh’s trifecta of acknowledged masterpieces: this movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate. When Leigh’s Susie Vargas alights at the desert motel and looks around the edge of the building, we almost expect a cutaway to the Bates house, up on a hill.
Welles packs his film with a gallery of grotesques — Akim Tamiroff’s literally greasy gangster, Dennis Weaver’s neurotic motel keeper and Mercedes McCambridge’s butch drug pusher. Universal executives must have fainted to see McCambridge’s entrance in the company of several jittery, hopped-up delinquents — it’s unlikely that any scene like that had appeared in a Hollywood picture since the pre-Code days.
The movie again proves Welles’ generosity to his actors. Some of the best material goes to talent seldom given much of a chance elsewhere. Ray Collins is the District Attorney badgered by Welles’ police captain. Akim Tamiroff is both the film’s main menace and its comic relief. Joseph Cotten appears as an unbilled guest star, as does Zsa Zsa Gabor. Joseph Calleia’s doggedly loyal sidekick Menzies is the most affecting character by far, a toady who undergoes a moral reformation. Welles uses him as a Sancho Panza character, but one who must accept that his Quixote is a fraud.
We’d expect Universal to thank its lucky stars to have Orson Welles crafting a masterpiece under their logo, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Welles’ business style won few friends in the studio system. He was considered a showoff, a pain in the neck guaranteed to make any executive look like a fool. Welles ignored production protocol and filming schedules, the life’s blood of the bean counters charged with micromanaging studio oversight.
Others might say that the director’s behavior guaranteed his banishment from ‘hire’ lists. Welles seemed to enjoy throwing wrenches into the works, as when he put Marlene Dietrich in a scene without telling the front office. The studio’s lawyers found out only when her face showed up in dailies. That stunt must have cued an interesting salary negotiation.
The opportunity for Universal to fire the maverick genius came when Welles foolishly (suicidally, one would think) absented himself from the studio to raise money for a personal production, Don Quixote. Charlton Heston reports that Welles simply took off and remained unreachable by phone. The studio lost no time ordering re-shoots and a full re-cut. When Welles saw a preview version, he wrote his famous 58-page memo, a pitiful attempt to ‘make nice’ and undo the damage. The memo’s pleading about audio montages and fine points of narrative most likely fell on deaf ears.
It’s unlikely that the longer Preview Version re-discovered at UCLA in 1972 was exactly the cut Welles delivered, before the studio took over. The disc encoding carries a commentary by critics Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore. Both have written books on Welles, and Rosenbaum served as an advisor on the 1998 restoration. They point out scenes excised for the theatrical cut, and re-shoot material directed by Harry Keller.
The Standard Theatrical Version slashes the film by twelve minutes, obscuring a number of important story points. A commentary by the late F.X. Feeney provides an excellent filmic analysis, making an interesting case for Touch of Evil as a major influence on Psycho. Also present is a new track with the critical insights of Tim Lucas. The author has all but cornered the market in audio commentaries — it seems I hear his voice every couple of weeks now.
The 1998 Reconstructed Version carries two commentaries. Restoration producer Rick Schmidlin guides the comments of the late stars Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh. A new commentary from Imogen Sara Smith is yet another analytical discussion, precise and well organized. Not repeated from the earlier editions is Rick Schmidlin’s very good solo track, relating his years-long effort to re-cut Touch of Evil. This missing track is needed to fully understand Schmidlin and Murch’s reasoned editorial choices. It gives us the benefit of a box of invaluable Welles notes kept by Universal’s head of post-production. Walter Murch was impressed to learn that the ‘perspectivized’ audio re-recording tricks he invented for American Graffiti were also the subject of experiments by Orson Welles on Touch of Evil 14 years before.
Did Universal not license the full Schmidlin commentary because its lawyers didn’t like some of the producer’s opinions? Schmidlin mentions UCLA professor Bob Epstein’s discovery of the preview cut, assigning credit where due. Epstein really should had written of this episode, one of several discoveries he made in the early days of the UCLA Film Archive.
Another essential extra not carried over from the two Universal editions is the text pamphlet with Orson Welles’ uncut 58-page ‘make nice’ memo, the one written to try to regain access to the editing room. A slightly annotated version of the memo can be found at Wellesnet. The notes are incredibly complicated, they tell us that Universal did execute a number of Welles’ suggestions.
The reconstructed version — really a major revision — used the memo document as a blueprint for recutting. Rick Schmidlin had access only to material in the preview and theatrical versions, as all trims and outs had long been destroyed. But some of the most significant changes involved simple trims and scene shuffling. Schmidlin points to a scene transition that, after being restored to Welles’ cutting plan, now results in a much clearer continuity. Schmidlin and Murch almost kept a close-up of Joseph Calleia, that Welles’ notes had asked to be removed. When they took it out, they discovered an improvement in the character tension in the film’s climax.
The most successful part of the Reconstructed Version is its sophisticated audio track. Luckily, discrete audio still existed for the theatrical version, including clean Henry Mancini music tracks. This allowed director-editor-soundtrack specialist Walter Murch to layer a sound design in the spirit of the one described in the famous 58-page memo — with digital technology unheard of in 1958. Welles wrote that he wanted bits of music to be heard only when their source was indicated on screen; car radios, live musicians, phonograph records. The disc set’s commentaries want to convince us that the 1998 version does restore Touch of Evil closer to Orson Welles’ original intentions.
Touch of Evil never received a first-run release, but went directly to double bills in neighborhood houses. Reviewers were mostly positive but most people caught up with it on late-nite TV, and later screenings in repertory houses and on college campuses. It was badly served in the 1995 crime comedy Get Shorty, as an example of an ‘ultra-hip, obscure cult film.’ John Travolta plays Chili Palmer, a cheap hood who is also a chronic film buff stricken with fan affectations that are . . . embarrassing. In Santa Monica’s Aero Theater, Chili rudely rhapsodizes over the conclusion of Touch of Evil, talking out loud to ‘Orson’ in a way that would get him thrown out of most any revival theater. There’s a fine line between film appreciation and criminal obnoxiousness.
