The Restored Touch Of Evil:
The Logic of a Nightmare
A new version of Orson Welles' noir-ish Touch of Evil
had its Montreal premiere October 25 as the final screening of this year's Festival
du Nouveau Cinéma (and now continues its run at Cinéma du Parc).
That a 40-year-old film should be included in a festival dedicated
to the "nouveau" might seem odd, but no matter what form one sees it in
- this is the third version of the film to be put in circulation since its initial
1958 release - Touch of Evil remains an exhilarating exhibition of the possibilities
inherent in cinema, and as such represents a fitting piece with which to close the
Festival. As François Truffaut noted back in 1958 (and he had seen only the
initial, eviscerated version), Touch of Evil is a film which "call[s] the cinema
to order."
Set in a suitably sleazy town straddling the Mexican-U.S. border, the film begins
with a double murder: a local tycoon and a woman he has picked up on the Mexican
side of town are blown up in their car just after they cross the frontier into the
U.S. The ensuing investigation pits the earnest Miguel Vargas, a top-ranking Mexican
police official (Charlton Heston), against the town's loc
al legend, Captain Quinlan
(Welles), a seedy, domineering American cop with a suspiciously perfect record for
solving cases. Tossed into the mix is local crime boss Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff),
whose elder brother Vargas has just put behind bars on a narcotics rap. To complicate
matters, Vargas is honeymooning with his American bride Susan (Janet Leigh), and
Quinlan is an inveterate racist. When Vargas begins to suspect Quinlan of having
planted evidence to pin the crime on the Mexican lover of the murdered man's daughter,
Quinlan allies with Grandi in an effort to ruin Vargas' reputation and destroy his
credibility.
As convoluted as all this sounds, this is not a plot-driven film. And a good thing
too, since the plot viewed out of context routinely strains one's ability to dutifully
suspend one's disbelief. How is it that Quinlan's loyal but thoroughly honest sidekick,
Sgt. Menzies (brilliantly portrayed by Joseph Calleia), has never suspected Quinlan's
integrity through decades of partnership? And why are the Vargases honeymooning in
this sleazy rat's nest? A sequence in which Grandi's henchmen try to force Susan
to take illicit drugs looks like lost footage from Reefer Madness, and the film's
denouement revolves around an improbable device that requires Vargas to scramble
around within earshot of Quinlan and Menzies without being seen. The logic here is,
as Welles memorably intoned in the prelude of his film The Trial, "the logic
of a dream...of a nightmare."
Certainly there is a nightmarish quality to Touch of Evil, as there is in most of
Welles' films. Significantly, Welles referred to cinema as "a ribbon of dreams"
which, if successful, required audience participation. As Welles stated in the opening
sequence of his unrealized film of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "You aren't going
to see this picture, this picture is going to happen to you."Accordingly, many
of the confusions and near incoherencies in Touch of Evil are attempts to disturb
the audience, to shock it out of its privileged observer status; to make the experience
transcend the vicarious and enter the realm of the visceral.
Predictably, all of this was lost on the Universal execs who, after
viewing the rough cut of thae film, promptly fired Welles and ordered re-shoots and
re-edits - nearly all of which were designed to impose a straightforward linear narrative
clarity. The result was an odd hybrid in which many of Welles' effects are undermined
by unnecessary and redundant exposition. For example, while Vargas encounters Quinlan
for the first time at the crime scene, Susan is accosted on the street and taken
to Grandi, who ineptly attempts to scare and threaten her about the consequences
if his brother should be convicted. When Vargas returns briefly to his hotel, Susan
begins to tell what happened to her. Welles originally cut away from this scene back
to Quinlan and his entourage. When Vargas rejoins the group he tells Quinlan about
what happened to Susan, providing the basis for extending the conflict between them.
Inexplicably, the studio ordered a re-shoot, inserting a scene in which the hotel
scene is extended, allowing Susan to tell Vargas the whole story of her encounter
with Grandi. Thus the same events are repeated three times within the space of ten
minutes - we witness Susan's encounter with Grandi, then we hear Susan tell Vargas
of the encounter, then Vargas repeats her account to Quinlan.
While the newly restored version of the film excises the interloping hotel
scene and intercuts the Vargas/Quinlan and Susan/Grandi sequences in rough approximation
of Welles' original intention, the film is hardly, as Universal boasts in its advertising,
"Fully Restored To Welles' Original Vision." Essentially, the restored
version is little different from the "long" print (107 min.) accidentally
discovered in 1975 which then replaced the truncated (93 min.) original release as
Universal's official print of the film. It would seem that this "long"
version represents what became of the film after Welles was forced out and that,
after having seen it, Universal realized they'd made a mess of things and trimmed
the film by another 15 minutes - rendering it even more incoherent than Welles' rough
cut - before quietly (there was no publicity budgeted for the film) releasing it
as the bottom half of a double bill.
Anything which was not in the "long" version seems to have been lost forever.
Welles, for example, said about 20 minutes of his rough cut disappeared after the
studio took over, most of which consisted of surrealistic dark comedy sequences which,
he said, the studio had found too disturbing. The "fully restored" version
then, represents not so much Welles' original vision, but an attempt to alter the
penultimate studio cut, taking into account Welles' well-known complaints over the
studio's final cut. Universal's publicity literature, which breathlessly describes
how the discovery of Welles' 58-page memo outlining his desired changes to the studio
cut provided, for the first time, a guide by which Welles' "vision" might
be restored, is a piece of advertising hokum.
All in all, the new version makes half a dozen or so changes. Visually, most involve
deletions and minor bits of re-editing. Along with the removal of the hotel scene
and the intercutting mentioned above, there is a faster cut-away from the bloated,
pop-eyed face of the strangulation victim to which Susan opens her eyes as she awakens
from her drug-induced unconsciousness. The only visual addition is the multiplication
of a shot in the "long" version in which Vargas turns on the radio in his
car. The close-up of a hand turning on the radio and then switching the station is
duplicated again and again, so that everyone who ever gets into a car is seen to
turn on the radio. This is one of the most striking changes, requiring equally striking
changes to the soundtrack, as it foreshadows and underlines the invasive cacophony
that reaches its climax when the Grandi gang attacks Susan - their invasion of her
motel room presaged by the ever increasing volume of the radio from the room next
door.
In a similar vein, the soundtrack under the film's wonderful opening shot has been
changed. Gone is the Mancini cha-cha theme, in its place a wash of sounds from the
street and music blaring out from various bars, clubs, and car radios. Also gone
are the film titles that obscured the incredible swooping and soaring single-take
crane shot in which an opening close-up of a timer being set on a bomb pans left
to the victims emerging from a nightclub, and then right to the bomber running down
the street to plant the bomb in the car. The camera then cranes high above the street
as the victims approach and enter the car. As the car moves off right, the shot moves
left, high above the town's main street, apparently abandoning the focus of attention,
only to have the car re-enter the shot from a side street. The camera then flies
along over the street, swooping in on various pedestrian groupings, while the car
is constantly struggling to catch up with the shot. When the shot finds Vargas and
Susan - their progress across the street halted by the car's passage - the camera
stays with them. Even when they catch up with car at the border crossing, the camera
follows them as they kiss, allowing the car to drive out of the shot. The film's
first editing cut comes with the sound of the explosion.
Throughout the film the camera is similarly serendipitous, constantly
moving away from what might ordinarily be thought of as the main action. Another
technically brilliant single take shot has Quinlan interrogating his prime suspect
in an apartment, the camera moving from the interrogation to follow Vargas to the
bathroom, where he washes his face and engages in inconsequential dialogue with the
assistant district attorney while the interrogation continues, barely audible, in
the background.
In addition the film is full of strikingly beautiful compositions: Vargas phones
Susan from a small shop while the blind shopkeeper sits impassively in the foreground.
Menzies is seen through the shop window in the background taking Grandi to see Quinlan,
underscoring the machinations which threaten Vargas (and Susan), but of which he
is unaware. Later we see Menzies in medium close-up, looking through a window in
which Quinlan and Grandi are reflected as they walk away together on the street,
visually hinting Menzies' growing doubts about his longtime friend and partner.
Touch of Evil was the last Hollywood film Welles was allowed to make, and his first
in over a decade. If anything, one is reminded that Welles' genius was not spent
after making Citizen Kane. It makes one mourn for the work that might have been,
had the Hollywood factory not redacted such films as The Magnificent Ambersons and
Lady From Shanghai (the latter cut to half its original running time, the former
lacerated by cuts and papered over with re-shoots); and if Welles had not been subsequently
banished from Hollywood, forced to ply his actor's trade in other people's films
for the sole purpose of financing independent projects on shoestring budgets. That
a Hollywood studio like Universal should now profit by taking credit for the (partial)
restoration of a film it had sabotaged to begin with is, at best, a final touch of
irony, if not of evil.
Ralph de Smit