Exactly how such a bizarre project came about is still a matter of conjecture. Newsweek reported that Welles had been offered the film as a sop for a character role he had played previously at Universal. Charlton Heston has said he suggested Welles as director after reading the film’s unpromising script, and there is no reason to doubt Heston’s goodwill and influence. Producer Albert Zugsmith, who was also responsible for some of the Douglas Sirk films, tells still another story. According to Zugsmith, Welles had come to Universal in the late fifties in need of money to pay tax debts, and Zugsmith cast him in the role of the heavy in Man in the Shadow (Jack Arnold, 1957). After this film, Zugsmith says, he and Welles became pals over a bottle of vodka, and Welles offered to direct the “worst” script the producer had to offer—the Paul Monash adaptation of Whit Masterson’s novel Badge of Evil.
Probably there is truth in all of these accounts. There is also the likelihood that Welles had manipulated everyone into believing the offer to direct was spontaneous, whereas in fact many of the themes and characterizations in Touch of Evil were generated out of roles he had been playing in Hollywood during the previous year. I have not seen Paul Monash’s original script, but Welles’s version has very little in common with the Masterson novel, which is not set in a border town, which does not contain a newlywed couple named Vargas, and which makes Hank Quinlan a secondary character. On the other hand, Touch of Evil owes a good deal to the appearances Welles had made recently as an actor. Earlier that year he had given an interesting performance as Will Varner in Martin Ritt’s The Long Hot Summer, and in Man in the Shadow he had been cast as a Southwestern rancher who exploits Mexicans. He had allowed himself to become typed as a fat racist, probably because the character was both colorful and appropriate to the times: the Supreme Court decision on segregation had occurred only four years before, the civil rights movement was under way, and everyone in Welles’s audience had a fresh memory of the incidents at Little Rock High, where National Guardsmen were called in to enforce a law that Southern politicians and policemen had been unwilling to support. Thus in Man in the Shadow, where he was allowed to rewrite his own scenes, Welles developed an embryonic version of the film he would later direct: a better-than-average Universal melodrama, it tells the story of how a demented, tyrannical bigot frames a liberal sheriff (Jeff Chandler) for murder. It is a more political movie than was usual for the studio, even though it doesn’t suggest that the police themselves might be racist and corrupt. Touch of Evil went further: Welles announced to the press that the point of his film would be “that the policeman’s job is to enforce the law, not to write it.”
The action that bears this message takes place during twenty-four hours in or near the hellish Mexican border town of Los Robles, where an influential construction magnate, Rudy Linnaker, has been blown up by dynamite. We learn almost nothing about Linnaker except that he once “had this town in his pocket” and has left behind a daughter who despises him. The film is concerned not with the crime itself, but with a conflict between Captain Quinlan of the American police (Welles) and Mike Vargas (Heston), a Mexico City narcotics agent who, for reasons that are unclear, is spending part of his honeymoon in Los Robles. (One character speculates that Vargas has come to “clean up” the Mexican side of the border—a casual remark that takes on ironic significance when Vargas wades through a dirty river at the end of the film.) Quinlan, who is a racist, tries to frame a Mexican for the Linnaker murder, and when Vargas uncovers this scheme, Quinlan conspires with the Grandi family, a gang of outlaws, to frame Vargas’s American wife (Leigh) in a sex crime. To cover his involvement in this plot, Quinlan murders the leader of the Grandis (Akim Tamiroff) and then dies at the hands of his old friend Menzies (Calleia), who has been forced by Vargas to recognize the extent of Quinlan’s corruption.
If these events are sometimes confusing, it is chiefly because the action occurs on a deliberately hazy, shifting borderland, where the audience is prone to lose their bearings. A time bomb is planted in Rudy Linnaker’s car while he is enjoying Mexican nightlife; the car explodes on the American side, and Quinlan goes in pursuit of the killer, blithely ignoring jurisdictional claims and describing himself as a “tourist.” The only Los Robles police we see are a couple of ineffectual traffic cops, and the Grandi family seem to control narcotics traffic in both countries. (“Some of us live on this side, some on the other,” their leader says.) The chief metaphoric and thematic device in the movie, therefore, is the crossing of boundaries—boundaries not only between nations but also, as will be seen, between law and sexuality. As a result the lines of conflict between two countries and opposing sets of characters become increasingly blurred.
A secondary confusion arose because Universal cut the original release print down to ninety-five minutes, creating an even more elliptical narrative than Welles intended. A 109-minute “prevue” version was discovered in 1976, containing additional material by Welles, plus new material by Universal house director Harry Keller. (Keller seems to have been in charge of the awkward, stylistically jarring scene in which Heston and Leigh drive to a motel, their car backed by a process screen.) A 111-minute “restored” version was released by Universal in 1998, produced by Rick Schmidlin and using material from both of the previous versions. Advertised as the “definitive cut,” the Schmidlin film was based on a fifty-eight-page memo Welles wrote to the studio in 1957 after viewing a rough cut assembled by the studio (now lost). All three films are available on Universal’s 50th-Anniversary Edition of Touch of Evil, issued as a boxed set of DVDs, with Welles’s memo included as an extra. The third version of the film is undoubtedly closest to Welles’s intentions (speaking personally, I wish the Henry Mancini music hadn’t been dropped), but as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out in his introduction to the Welles memo, there is no such thing as a director’s cut of Touch of Evil, “because the director was never accorded a final cut in the first place.” Given that proviso, the analysis that follows is based mostly on the prevue version, which I prefer.
I
Whatever changes Universal made, Touch of Evil retains its visual fascination and its moral ironies. André Bazin and Joseph McBride have placed strong emphasis on the film’s ethics, pointing out the ways it requires us to make a separation between our emotional involvement with the characters and our intellectual commitment to a liberal thesis. Certainly it is a vivid contrast with other social problem films of the time (Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, for example, which was nominated for several awards in the previous year), forcing us to acknowledge the humanity and intelligence of the racist Quinlan even though we see clearly that he is evil. At the end of the movie we are told that the Mexican shoe clerk is guilty after all. Audiences usually take this as the ultimate Wellesian irony, but the longer version of the film has still more complications: during the long scene where Quinlan and his men are interrogating Sanchez, the camera exits from the room for a moment and we can hear a punch and a low moan—the sound of police beating their suspect. Sanchez is an unpleasant fellow, as Vargas himself comments, and is a likely perpetrator of the crime, yet given what we know of Los Robles’s third-degree methods, it would be a mistake to accept the truth of his “confession.” Quinlan’s last order to his associate Menzies is an angry command to break Sanchez; therefore at the end of the film nothing has really been proved about Linnaker’s murder—the point has been not to discover the culprit, but to disclose tensions between justice and pragmatism, between individual passions and social rules, between psychological guilt and legal responsibility.
Doubtless one reason why Quinlan is so sympathetic is that he is played by Welles, in a performance that compares with his work in Citizen Kane and Chimes at Midnight. In some ways Welles’s acting here is superior, because he gives the role a density that has rather little to do with what the screenplay tells us directly. When Welles uses the dialog to explain the character, as in Quinlan’s drunken recollection of his wife’s murder at the hands of a “half-breed,” the res
ult is disappointingly feeble; indeed Welles’s uneasiness about such an explanation is reflected in the offhand, almost unintelligible way the scene is played. The truly intriguing qualities of Quinlan’s character arise more from the eccentricities of his behavior than from literary keys to his motives. Largely through acting skills, Welles makes him both a type and an individual, a redneck cop and a bundle of contradictions. To cite a few complexities: he is a shambling, bloated fellow with a game leg, but he has the strength of an ox, and in the scene where he kills Joe Grandi, the impossible agility of a psychopath. His face has the puffy, big-nosed plainness of a lower-class W. C. Fields (rarely has Welles’s makeup achieved so believable a distortion of his true looks), and yet is capable of expressing a wide range of emotion—everything from misanthropic cruelty, to honeyed charm, to deep grief. Quinlan is a brute, but like most Wellesian brutes he is also a sentimentalist; he uses his one friend with a reckless egocentricity worthy of Charlie Kane, yet his outward appearance bespeaks an inner torment, and he suffers moments of remorse that are supposed to remind us of Macbeth.
Welles has followed his usual practice of making the villain the most fully developed personality in the film, thus forcing a political melodrama into the realm of personal tragedy. We can sense the relationship between Quinlan and the other Welles protagonists in the first remarks made about him, a comment by District Attorney Adair (Ray Collins): “Old Hank must’ve been the only one in the county who didn’t hear the explosion.” This casual reference to age and isolation prepares us for the pathos of the man; he is a brooding, introspective spirit, caught in a fat and decaying body, living out his last days on a two-acre “turkey ranch” as remote as Xanadu. But even in his aloofness he retains influence over the town, and from his arrival on the scene of the Linnaker murder he easily dominates the action, moving slowly and with a whalelike power, mumbling in a weary, pained monologue while various officials bob deferentially around him and shout back and forth.
Behind Quinlan’s viciousness there is something childlike, almost Falstaffian. During his inquisition of Sanchez, for example, he sends a lieutenant out for coffee; when the man returns, Quinlan looks mournfully down at the cup and asks, “Couldn’t you get me some doughnuts? Sweet rolls?” He is humanized in other ways, too: he has a good friend in Menzies, whose life he has saved and who admires him next to idolatry, and we learn that he’s never used his power to enrich himself. In one of the most compelling images of the film, we gaze up with him at an oil derrick, the camera rocking hypnotically from side to side as the machinery pumps up and down. “Money. Money,” Quinlan whispers in time with the movement, acknowledging the power of greed but remaining awesomely detached and self-righteous. “I’m not a lawyer,” he tells Vargas. “All lawyers care about is the law.” And from the one lawyer we see—Marcia Linnaker’s rich, weasely attorney—we can at least understand his anger.
But the most important device of all in gaining sympathy for Quinlan is Tanya, the Mexican prostitute who knew him in the old days and who is as important to this movie as “Rosebud” is to Citizen Kane. Welles’s work has always oscillated between misanthropy and sentiment, but these extremes are never more apparent than when Marlene Dietrich appears in Touch of Evil, creating a melancholy humor and bittersweet calm that throw the rest of the film into high relief. A good many viewers are likely to dismiss her entirely as a simpleminded gimmick more patent than Kane’s sled—a celebrity posing as an earth-motherly whore. Nevertheless, her very artificiality is part of her meaning, and her scenes create many of the same ambiguities as the references to the hero’s childhood in Kane. In fact, of the many allusions to the earlier film in Touch of Evil, one of the most interesting is in a brief bit of dialogue regarding Tanya that was cut from the original release: Adair remarks to a companion that Tanya will “cook chili” for Quinlan, or maybe “bring out the crystal ball.” The comment reminds us that, like the glass toy Kane grasps in his dying moments, Tanya’s house is a self-enclosed realm reminiscent of the past; also like the toy it is both tawdry and beautiful, suggesting at one and the same time Quinlan’s self-delusion and his idealism. Quinlan’s visits there are a pathetic attempt to return to preadolescence, a stage in life that Welles’s heroes seem unable to transcend, and as always this stage is associated with a preindustrial past, when things were not so degraded.
Figures 6.1–6.2: Quinlan in the bordello.
The contrast between Tanya’s rooms and the city of Los Robles is emphasized when Quinlan stands in the streets, munching a candy bar, and is captivated by the sound of a pianola, while in the distance Adair bids reluctant farewell to the more modern prostitutes of the Rancho Grande. A moment later Quinlan steps dreamily onto Tanya’s veranda, drawn toward her parlor as rubbish blows past an oil derrick behind his head. Inside, however, Tanya’s rooms create the same ironies as Kane’s snowy paperweight, and the emotional power of the scene rises out of a tension in the mise-en-scène between romance and cynicism. Tanya herself is both mother and whore, both mystic and cynical realist, whereas Quinlan seems to have stepped into an ironic childhood. In the two pictures here (see figs. 6.1 and 6.2), for example, he is first shown eating candy the way a child sucks his thumb; he is then seen drowsing amid Victorian bric-a-brac, stuffed animals, and the bullfight memorabilia of Welles’s own adolescence, all of it thrown together like a junk shop. The effect of these bordello scenes is both funny and sad, especially in the way the present keeps intruding on the past: Quinlan is so aged and fat that Tanya doesn’t recognize him; a television set is perched atop the pianola; and even the music of Henry Mancini is synthetically sweet, perfectly appropriate to a place where everything has become “so old it’s new.” But while the imagery creates an impressive poetry, the plot drives forward on its melodramatic path. In one shot (omitted in the original release) Quinlan sees the figure of Vargas moving ghostlike outside Tanya’s windows. Welles’s symbolism is clear: Quinlan is compared to the noble bull above his head, prepared for the kill by banderillas; meanwhile Vargas, whose reflection we see in the mirror at the extreme lower left, is compared to the matador’s photograph on the wall. In his drunkenness Quinlan assumes that Vargas is a dream, even though it has become obvious, as Tanya says to him in her fortune-teller’s voice, that his “future is all used up.” Desperately, he avoids the consequences of his acts until the end of the movie, when he shoots Menzies and tries vainly to wash the blood off his hands.
In contrast to this fascinating villain, Mike Vargas is the nominal hero of the film and the bearer of Welles’s own political viewpoint. As Charlton Heston has remarked, he is mainly a “witness” to Quinlan’s fall, but he remains an admirable figure, torn between his sense of justice and his love for his wife. Heston gives a remarkably believable, un-stereotyped portrayal of a Mexican (“he sure don’t talk like one,” Quinlan says), and because of his strength and virility he becomes the most satisfying of all the antagonists to Welles’s tyrants. For all his virtues, however, Mike Vargas is not supposed to be a spotless bearer of the truth. He is a shade too privileged and stiff, so preoccupied with his role as chief of the “Pan American Narcotics Commission” that he actually puts his wife in danger. There is in fact a twisted comedy in the way his job keeps taking him away from his highly sexual mate, so that most viewers regard him as excessively pure. Even when he confronts Quinlan with a ringing statement of the film’s thesis (“a policeman’s job is only easy in a police state”), Welles deliberately undercuts the power of his line by the way the scene is framed. Quinlan and Vargas are photographed in a tight close-up, facing each other at either side of the screen; as Vargas speaks the important words, Quinlan turns his head slowly toward the camera, his eyes rolling in wonderfully comic derision, commenting on Vargas’s self-importance and rhetoric.
Figures 6.3: Quinlan, compared to a bull, senses Vargas, compared to a matador.
In contrast to Quinlan, who is usually shown from low, portentous angles, Vargas is photographed with wide-angle tra
cking shots that express the anger, intensity, and sexual frustration behind his cool exterior. But in the later part of the film, his reserve breaks and he is forced to imitate his enemy. When Vargas’s wife is attacked, he becomes “a husband now, not a cop”; when he bashes a hoodlum’s head into the glass arch of a jukebox, he echoes the scene where Quinlan forces Joe Grandi’s head through an identical arch in a transom; when he grabs a thug by the neck and carries him the full length of a bar, he makes us recall the scene where Quinlan strangles Grandi by lifting him off the floor; finally, he and Menzies entrap Quinlan with a bugging device, and Vargas confesses (in another shot cut from the original release) that his ethics have been compromised. “I hate this machine,” he says, but he continues to work out his revenge, insisting that the unmasking of Quinlan is his duty, just as Quinlan has assumed that the destruction of killers is his own “dirty job.”
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 22