- Although I've never particularly loved Touch of Evil, even I have to admit that it marks the end of conventional film noir. It's the cinematic equivalent of an alcoholic who lets things go too far and finally has to swear off the stuff for the rest of their life. And at the center of everything roosts screenwriter, director, and actor Orson Welles, swollen to unusual proportions and seemingly nursing a grudge against the film category that came to prominence the same year he released Citizen Kane. I've always imagined Welles pitching this film with something along the lines of "You want ugly? Well get a load of this!"
- Touch of Evil opens with the most famous tracking shot in film history, following the insertion of a car bomb in Mexico all the way to its logical conclusion just across the border. On the scene as a witness is Miguel "Mike" Vargas (Charlton Heston), a Mexican narcotics agent newly married to an American named Susan (Janet Leigh), but it's not exactly his jurisdiction. Instead, the case falls to Captain Quinlan (Welles), the most game-legged, mumbling, sebaceous, corrupt cop you could ever imagine. Quinlan's partner Menzies (Joseph Calleia) and various other hangers-on (Ray Collins, Harry Shannon) are all unquestionably devoted to Quinlan and gladly look the other way when he frames a young man named Sanchez (Victor Millan) for the bombing. Vargas knows better, but he and the assistant D.A. (Mort Mills) are going to have a tough time proving that Quinlan is guilty.
- In the meantime, Susan finds herself perpetually abandoned by her new husband and ends up at the loneliest motel in the world, somewhere just north of the border. As creepy as the oddball night manager (Dennis Weaver) may seem, he's considerably more respectable than the gang of ne'er-do-wells (Val de Vargas, Mercedes McCambridge) who work for Vargas's drug-dealing nemesis, Grandi (Akim Tamiroff). After waging psychological war on Susan, they arrange it to look like she went on a drug-fueled bender just before Quinlan swoops in to add a charge of murder to that frame. Now Vargas is going to have to nail Quinlan if he ever hopes to clear his wife's name. Strangely, her reputation seems to be his major concern.
- Did I mention that Marlene Dietrich plays a fortune teller in this film? Or that Joseph Cotton portrays a mustachioed coroner?? How about Zsa Zsa Gabor as the owner of a club that advertises "20 Sizzling Strippers"???
- The fact is, no film could possibly be expected to sustain the creativity and energy captured in Touch of Evil's opening sequence. The camera and sound work as the audience follows the soon-to-be-exploded car along with Mr. and Mrs. Vargas is simply perfect and more than enough to justify the price of admission. Still, one could hope that the rest of the film would have followed up with something better than an incoherent nightmare starring Charlton Heston made Mexican via bronzer and hair dye. The direction and Russell Metty's cinematography throughout the film are top-notch, as is Henry Mancini's soundtrack, but far too much screentime is wasted on Welles delivering Falstaffian monologues on chili or Leigh looking threatened in a bed. As Dietrich said to Welles, so does Welles say to film noir: "Your future's all used up."
