Some Kind of A Man

TOUCH OF EVIL

It is a thousand things; a flawed masterpiece, a marvel of analog technical achievement, a tale of impotence both sexual and psychological, an imbalanced but indispensable piece of social commentary , and a mournful howl from a cinematic demi-God dethroned. However, for me at least, one of Touch of Evil's most important characteristics is that it is basically a re-hash of The Third Man, re-done and done correctly.

Both films feature deeply moral, self-righteous, slightly naive heroes who cross paths with publicly patriotic but privately corrupt men (played in both cases by Orson Welles) and as a result have their faith in their country, and by extension the world, shattered. I know, I know, The Third Man has long been considered one of the best films of all time, while Touch of Evil is often dismissed as an smartly directed, enjoyably garish piece of scuzzy drive-in noir. This never-ending love affair with The Third Man remains to me one of the most mysterious aspects of film-critic psychology; here is a film that desperately wants us to feel its existential fever in our bones, but that gives us a villain too cracklingly charismatic to really hate, a hero too bluntly inept to really pity, and a visual style that doesn't assist with the conveyance of mood, but instead replaces mood. It wants to take us into the depths of the human condition without getting its hands dirty; it over-aestheticizes its story and thus de-claws it.

Nine years later, Welles went behind the camera and basically put the same story up on the screen again, and what an improvement it is; Touch of Evil is a grungy, gutsy journey into the heart of darkness, but it's also a fiendishly entertaining potboiler. What makes the movie work is its lack of vanity; the characters are allowed to sweat and spit and smoke and drink, and the border town where they do all these things is presented pitilessly, as a hot, venal hive of sexual confusion and petty grievances. Here, two matinee ideals (Charlton Heston and Welles himself) team up to de-glamorize the kind of movies that made them famous, to strip them of excess idealism and bring the genre picture into the turned-on, pissed-off sixties. Old Hollywood dies here.

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The opening shot is perhaps the most famous in movies, so much so that those who've never even seen a Welles picture can identify it. We start off with a quick glimpse of a bomb being placed in a car. The trunk shuts, a clueless couple enters the vehicle, and they start off down this border town's Main Street. As we follow the car, we're introduced to the townspeople, the cops, and our two main characters: Vargas (Heston), a Mexican cop crossing over into the US to honeymoon with his American bride, Susan (Janet Leigh). It is only when the car explodes and Vargas dashes over to the scene of the crime that we realize this entire prologue has been one four-minute unbroken take. In the simplest terms, the picture is about this explosion, its aftermath, Vargas's quest to solve it, and the devastating consequences of his curiosity. Quinlan, a local celebrity cop (Welles) is put on the case; his unsound methods send Vargas searching for departmental corruption, much to the chagrin of Quinlan's loyal Sergeant Menzies (Joseph Calleia). Meanwhile, Susan checks into the local motel, and is subjected to a real night from hell, culminating in a drug-aided assault that ties all the divergent subplots together and sends the picture racing toward its increasingly inevitable conclusion.

A pulpy plot, yes but, to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, "kitsch redeemed" was Welles' speciality. After all, the downfall of Charlie Kane was melodrama to the bone until Welles saw the Shakespearean sadness at its heart; The Magnificent Ambersons would be a stew of cliche had he not spiced it up with operatic grandeur. And Touch of Evil would be a long-discarded hunk of scratched celluloid were it not for Welles's bleak worldview, as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of and general disregard for genre conventions.

This is noir informed by noir, with characters in a studio flick make use their experience viewing similar studio flicks. Their recognition of cinematic stereotypes isn't the driving force behind their actions-it's just one of the countless factors that determine their attitudes and actions-racial prejudices, unfounded phobias, past experiences, etc, etc. Take for example Susan's run-in with local kingpin Grandi (Arif Tamarik) and his lackeys. They don't strike out at the newlywed, though that comes soon enough. They simply circle her like an incensed snake, dropping little insults and vague threats. She'll have none of it.

"You know what's wrong with you?", she retorts, "You've seen too many gangster movies."

Less than a decade earlier, a line like this would've been unthinkable. But the deluge of crime and noir pictures released in the late 40's and early 50's (High Sierra, White Heat, Key Largo) meant that such trash talk was now common knowledge. These men can't intimidate Susan--she's seen it all on the big screen. By referencing pre-existing knowledge of genre, and thus indirectly alluding to individual films, Touch of Evil paved the way for the meta-movie--pictures like Pulp Fiction that use cinematic cross-referencing to deepen their characters, or the Scream series (side note: since the new one is legally titled Scre4m, do I call it "Scream 4" or "Scree-four-MMMM"?), where literally the entire plot is driven by the plots of previous horror movies.

It's not just the characters movie know-how that makes this one interesting-it's Welles's too. There's a standard-issue cop drama scene where a potential perp is interrogated, and, when things don't go well, he gets the bloody bejesus beaten out of him by a livid lawman. This scene has been done to death, portrayed in every way, shape, and form allowed by the ratings system. Welles', having made as well as seen his share of thrillers, knows this, and thus shows us what we haven't scene-the reactions of the other people in the room. We merely hear the noises from the thrashing (which, incidentally, allows us to visualize far more with our rampant imaginations than Hays Code Hollywood would've ever flat-out shown), and shift our gaze to men who have seen this hundred times before, but still flinch a little as if it were their first day on the job. The words are the same, but the illustrations have changed.

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One word comes to mind when I think of this film; rot. Even fifty some-odd years later, I can think of few movies as explicit and effective in their portrayal of blight and corruption. Everything in this movie is decaying; the city streets, the country roads, the bars and alleys and windows and walls. The abstract, too--Susan's innocence, Vargas's naivete, and, hell even moral decay itself decays, as the local gangsters shed all traces of the honor-among-thieves philosophy and resort to half-baked drug runs and itchy-trigger-finger revenge schemes.

But no one is falling apart quite like Hank Quinlan. The local emblem of justice and vigilance, he so fears Vargas's campaign against him that his efforts to thwart it turn him into the very kind of monster he once prided himself on bringing to justice. By the end of the film, he's a fallen idol-but, then again, by this point in his career, so was the actor who played him. Welles was weighed down by his constant battles with his women, his studio, and his audience (his adaptation of Camus' The Stranger so infuriated some moviegoers that they hung him in effigy after they saw the picture). His endless struggles to fulfill his often difficult vision had stripped him of his pretty-boy looks, leaving him a moribund mass of flesh and bone and broken dreams. Perhaps that's what drove him to turn a piece of pulp fiction into a scathing meditation on the dissolution of all things bright and beautiful. It is Welles' understanding of Quinlan that makes his performance resonate, and lifts the movie from good to great. Watch the scene where a cheap hood tricks him into breaking his teetotal streak. As he contemplates the empty glass in front of him, his stubble-choked jaw sinks, his mouth twitches, his eyes are filled with years of dammed-up misery and self-loathing--this is powerful stuff, stuff that haunts your dreams. Welles' sadness becomes Quinlan's sadness becomes our sadness--and, in a scene all the more heartbreaking because it allows him a brief moment of satisfaction, his happiness becomes our happiness as he stands by an old pianola and reminisces with and old flame (Marlene Dietrich, of all people). Hank Quinlan is one of the most endlessly fascinating characters in the movies.

This leads me to the film's one major flaw; while Welles' clearly made it because he was drawn to the Quinlan character, the novel open which it is based, Badge of Evil, puts Heston's Vargas at the center of the action. Every character in the piece is more interesting than Vargas. To wit; Susan is an unusually tough broad. Grandi is evil but almost comically inept in the ways he implements his evil plans--until at last one is successful, with lethal results. And Menzies, while at first just a typical cop-with-a-conscience, ultimately becomes up the picture's only paragon of goodness and redemptive possibility, an almost Christ-like figure. How can a typical tough-guy detective stack up against that roster?! Nonetheless, I don't doubt Heston and Welles could've come up with something. But Welles' the actor was so busy losing himself in a part that was clearly an object of obsession that he didn't have much energy to devote to coaching his lead. As such, we're fully conscious of the difference between Vargas and the more dynamic supporting characters everytime Heston comes onscreen. He was a good actor, but not good enough to compensate for the fact that there's a great big black hole where a 3-D character should've been. Forget the fact that he doesn't look Hispanic--there are times in this one where he doesn't even look human.

But, as with works by everyone from John Milton to Peter Jackson, this is a creation of such unwieldy ambition that we forgive the flawed whole because so many of the parts are staggeringly successful. There is a weak lead performance. But there is solid ensemble work. There is a setting that enters the geography of our psyche as few movie towns really do. There is technical mastery that manifests itself in the smaller moments as well as the big action setpieces-that final chase, with Vargas trapped in the middle of an out-of-control oil derrick, is a doozy. There is a score by Henry Mancini that is one of my all-time favorites. There is a healthy dose of gallows humour. There are deep moral inquiries made without pretension or excessive deep-dish philosophizing. And, of course, there is Hank Quinlan. Marlene Dietrich speaks the final line, which serves as both an insult and a compliment to him; "He was some kind of a man." Yes, and because of him, this is some kind of a movie.

Welles in his youth.

Nota bene: Whether or not this is exactly what Welles' wanted us to see, we'll never know-Hollywood butchered his original cut. Luckily, he left a lengthy pamphlet detailing how one would go about reconstructing his damaged masterpiece, and, with an army of film restorers, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum spent years and years making sure his instruction were followed almost to the letter. Thus, a filmic phoenix, risen from the ashes. And they say critics are good for nothing!