Despite this experience, Vargas never acquires the tortured soul of a Quinlan or a Menzies, who have a more intimate acquaintance with rattiness, sin, and guilt. Perhaps that is why, in the contrast between the chief antagonists, Touch of Evil creates an effect vaguely similar to Graham Greene’s thrillers—especially to a novel like Brighton Rock, where the author’s vision of a moral wasteland is contrasted to the simple “right and wrong” of liberal humanism. Welles even evoked Greene for comparison when he began working on the film: “Greene,” he said, “is concerned with the plight of the soul. This is about the plight of the citizen.” Moreover, in occasionally transcending legalities to emphasize time and the inevitability of death, Touch of Evil echoes another famous crime novelist. At the end of the film, two characters—the D.A.’s man Schwartz (Mort Mills) and the prostitute Tanya—stand looking down at Quinlan’s body, which has fallen into the shallows of an oily river. Schwartz, who is something of a cool opportunist, remarks that Quinlan was a “good detective.” Tanya adds that he was a “lousy cop” and is given the last, most fundamental comment: “What does it matter what you say about people?” she asks, her words and the imagery matching almost exactly the elegiac sentiments in the last paragraph of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep:
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.
II
But these references to the “human condition” do not fully account for the power of Touch of Evil. At some point one needs to deal with the kinky, beautifully lascivious qualities of the movie—with what I’ve already called its pulpy surface. And here one inevitably talks more about the female characters than about the males. For if the males are vehicles for moral argument, the females are presented largely as objects of sexual fantasy and are the deepest reasons for the superstructure of legal forms and rules that are guarded by the police.
Like Psycho, a film it probably influenced, Touch of Evil uses the sexual charms of Janet Leigh for all they are worth, dressing her in silken undies, making her the victim of assault in a motel. At the other extreme from her, of course, is Dietrich, and together these two embody all the stereotypes of female sexuality in popular art. We don’t immediately recognize them as a basis for the film’s emotional energy, because Tanya is extraneous to the plot and is brought into conjunction with Susie Vargas only twice: first when Welles cuts from the attack on Susie to a brief scene in Tanya’s bordello, and then at the conclusion, when Tanya crosses in front of the Vargas auto as Mike and Susie are embracing—“Mike,” Susie cries, and almost simultaneously Tanya shouts, “Hank!” Once they are set together, their importance as a pair becomes obvious.
Figures 6.4–6.5: Female sexuality in Touch of Evil: Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh) and Tanya (Marlene Dietrich).
Together the two women are perfect examples of the fair lady/dark lady imagery that runs throughout American literature and Hollywood cinema, an imagery that has always suggested latent tensions of race and social class as well as the underlying American ambivalence about “wildness” versus domesticity. Hence they are in exact visual contrast: one is blonde and youthfully voluptuous, the other is dark and ageless; one is spunky, rational, and naïve, the other is mysterious and world-weary; one is a wife, the other a prostitute. Between them they account for the film’s radical shifts of mood, its movement between violence and quiet, between the rock-and-roll sounds piped through a motel intercom and the wistful melodies of a whorehouse pianola.
In Touch of Evil this vision of womanhood is used in an ironic, or at least highly self-conscious, way because one of the obvious aims of the film is to explore the sexual psychology of race hatred. And here, as in the law/police theme, Welles manages to raise social issues while avoiding the trap of rhetoric; he also takes considerable risks, dealing with the most lurid fantasy material without becoming simply opportunistic. To appreciate his success, one must observe the degree to which the film has been made to represent an unstable borderland—an actual border between the United States and Mexico, a social border between whites and Latins, and an even more volatile psychological border between civilization and the libido. Hence the legal, social, and sexual issues are intertwined, as they are in life, and the conflict between Vargas and Quinlan takes place against a background of sexual relations between the races. Marcia Linnaker has been having an affair with a Mexican shoe clerk; Vargas is insecure about the impression Mexico has made upon his blonde, Philadelphia-born wife; Quinlan says that years previously his own wife was strangled by a “half-breed” (even though he now crosses the border to take refuge with a Mexican prostitute); and in the most disturbing scenes of the film, Susie Vargas is made to believe she has been raped by the greasy-haired, leather-jacketed Grandi gang. The whole movie, to borrow one of Joseph Cotten’s lines, is a “mixed party” (an old Southern expression referring to a sex party with a mixture of races).
Perhaps the central importance of this theme will become more apparent if we examine a locus classicus: the opening shot. “It’s in all the books,” an interviewer once told Charlton Heston, but it is worth further analysis. One of the most spectacular moments in Welles’s career, it is also functional, establishing the “world” of the film and revealing the social and sexual tensions that underlie the story.
The shot begins with a close-up of hands setting a time bomb, accompanied by Henry Mancini’s bongos and the sound of a prostitute’s laughter echoing down half-empty streets. It ends, about two minutes and fifteen seconds later, as Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh kiss and we hear the sound of an explosion. In between, the camera executes a complex and beautiful tracking movement, rushing after the bomber as he plants the explosive in the trunk of a convertible; rising in the sky as a couple enter the car; arching over dark roofs and neon signs as the loaded vehicle drives out to the street; then drifting backward ahead of the car to present gradually the town of Los Robles—a type of sin city that the better Hollywood thrillers have always created with ease but that Welles has given a special intensity and visual wit.
Universal printed credits over part of the shot and scored it with a Mancini theme—one of the relatively few times when music originates from something other than a “natural” dramatic source. Despite the changes, however, Welles’s skill is obvious, his vision of Los Robles at once more stylized and more specific than the usual studio expressionism. The extreme wide-angle lens opens out space at either side of the screen, giving forward or backward movement a preternatural effect; cars and figures on the street below are blocked in discernible patterns, crossing at diagonals in the near foreground like players on an ever expanding stage set. Los Robles does not resemble actual places like Tijuana or Matamoros (it is in fact Venice, California, exploited for its pseudo-Venetian architecture, its aging oil wells, and its general decay), yet it is quite true to the essence of border towns. On the streets we see strip joints and prostitution, a few ragged Mexican poor, and a couple of men trundling fantastic pushcarts. Most of the crowd is made up of tourists, chiefly American servicemen and workers in hardhats who are pumping oil out of the land. The town seems not to have prospered much from this industry; clearly it exists by selling vice to the Yankees, functioning as a kind of subconscious for Northerners, a night world just outside their own boundaries where they can enjoy themselves even while they imagine the Mexicans are less civilized. (In fact the most corrupt places in Los Robles—the Rancho Grande and the Ritz Hotel—are owned by a man who keeps insisting he is an “American citizen.”)
The contrast between the Mexicans and the Americans is made blatant by the passage of Rudy Linnaker’s shiny convertible through the streets, impeded now and then by a traffic cop or a herd of goats. But midway through town the camera descends to street
level, allowing the car to pass briefly out of sight while it picks up a walking couple (Heston and Leigh) who are equally out of keeping with the environment. Handsome, well-tailored, they seem oblivious to the grotesque background and the time-bombed car that keeps drifting in and out of proximity. Before the shot is over we discover that they are representatives of the two countries whose borders meet here. Significantly, however, they come not from the border towns themselves, but from more prosperous worlds to the north and south. Each is confident and possessed of the right moral sensibilities, but as Susie Vargas remarks toward the end of the shot, this is the first time they’ve crossed a border together.
Vargas later tells his wife that Los Robles “isn’t the real Mexico.” “All border towns bring out the worst in a country,” he says, and in the closing section of the film he emphasizes the difference between Susie’s immaculate whiteness and the dark, garbage-laden streets of the town. She has to be taken away from this “filth,” he tells Menzies. Her name has to be kept “clean, clean!” But there is a closer link than Vargas ever admits between border towns and inlands, which are all part of the “real” country. The border is a zone where the latent corruption and sexual anxieties of the more respectable territories break through to the surface, just as it is a place where the economic exploitation of one country by another becomes more obvious. The dirty oil fields of Los Robles help produce the comforts of Philadelphia, and racial tension in one town has an effect on the unconscious life of another. Thus, immediately after Vargas tells Susie that border towns bring out the worst in a country, he remarks, “I can just see your mother’s face if she saw our honeymoon hotel.” Here, and in various other places, Welles implies a symbolic connection between the Vargases’ marriage and their presence on the border. They’ve “crossed over” into a sexual contact that, in Los Robles at least, is usually kept surreptitious. As a result, their security and complacency will be disrupted.
At the conclusion of the famous trucking shot that opens the film, Welles stresses the potential dangers of the Vargas marriage. The couple have just stepped into America, where they pause briefly and exchange affectionate words. The dark, handsome Mexican takes the voluptuous blonde into his arms, and their kiss is timed exactly with an explosion. The shot ends with a cut to a flaming auto dropping from midair, the camera zooming back slightly to convey the impact of the blast. The time bomb concealed beneath the street life of Los Robles therefore becomes not only an exciting way to open the melodrama but also a metaphor for the remaining action: it suggests apocalyptic forces ticking away under the street life of the border town, forces that have been ignited by the violation of a sexual taboo.
With the explosion of Linnaker’s car, the film literally shatters into montage fragments. The plot, too, begins to segment as Vargas runs to the bomb site and his wife returns to the “safety” of their hotel. Welles photographs the aftermath of the explosion in a rapid series of tightly composed images that suggest chaos and bewilderment—little groups of players conversing in the darkness, or single heads isolated on the screen, twisted out of shape by the lens and lighted by flames. (The largest portion of the crowd is seen from the point of view of the dead man, in a low-angle shot that recalls the funeral in The Magnificent Ambersons.) During the next few moments, a parallel montage begins to set off the encounter between Vargas and Quinlan against Susie’s journey through the raucous streets of Los Robles, where she immediately begins attracting sinister Mexican males.
From this point on, Touch of Evil begins shifting back and forth between the legal plot and the sexual plot, between Vargas’s idealistic concern for justice and Susie’s gradual descent into the Los Robles underworld. The two strands are woven together with considerable skill, producing a fine sense of emotional contrast and thematic interplay. In fact, Touch of Evil seems as much concerned with crossing narrative and visual paths as with crossing borders. In the opening shot, two couples move along the same streets, their routes intersecting but never quite touching; during the early scenes, the Grandis trail Mike and Susie everywhere they walk; at the close, Mike follows Quinlan and Menzies with a tape recorder, moving along a roughly parallel course through a maze of oil wells, barely missing discovery until the denouement. In Kane and Ambersons the cutting and the elaborate superimpositions had been designed to give the audience a sense of now versus then, but in Touch of Evil the same devices make us feel the importance of here versus there. The dark, cosmic humor of the film derives from a pattern of coincidence and juxtaposition within a limited time and space, the Vargases’ narrow escape from an explosion being the first in a series of near misses: Linnaker’s car almost blows up in Mexico; Quinlan almost succeeds in planting evidence against Sanchez; Vargas enters his hotel room a moment too late, just after his wife has been spotlighted by the Grandis; later, he drives right past Susie while her screams blend into street noises. Gradually, these accidents take on the same fatalistic tone one finds in Kane.
When Welles isn’t using mobile, deep-focus shots to emphasize fateful mishaps and dual lines of action, he is editing so as to underline the ironies of his double plot. The most obvious example of this technique is in a cheesecake shot of Janet Leigh in her lingerie, where male viewers are given a chance to indulge their voyeurism. Leigh reclines on the motel bed, her hair down to her shoulders, her body covered with luminescent silk. But the glamour and seductiveness of the image is disrupted when we cut to the frustrated Heston at the other end of the telephone line—a deep-focus composition with the pinched face of a blind woman in the foreground.
Figures 6.6–6.7: Phone conversation between Susie in the motel and Mike (overheard by a blind woman).
We’ve already seen a similar device in The Lady from Shanghai, but here it foreshadows many other, less ostentatious conjunctions—as when the door of the Mirador Motel slams on Susie’s “rape” just as another door opens in the police hall of records. And when Welles uses a slow dissolve in the manner of his transitions in Kane, he gives the device a new richness and power, stressing thematic comparisons and contrasts. Consider three images that take us from one place to another (see figs. 6.8–6.10). Here the dissolve is not meant to indicate “time passing,” as it usually does, but rather the parallel between Menzies and Susie, both of them abandoned by a person they love. In the first shot Menzies watches Quinlan and Joe Grandi walking away toward a bar, their figures reflected in the window glass. Next, a dissolve shows a desert landscape superimposed on Menzies’s face; as this new picture comes into view, Susie raises a window shade, her image appearing at the opposite side of the screen. The desert is revealed as a reflection in Susie’s window and has been superimposed over both faces. Four separate images have been blended into a single transition, and the effect is heightened further by the soundtrack: in the first shot we hear distant church bells slowly ringing through the streets, but as Susie and the desert appear, the bells give way to noisy rock-and-roll from the motel speakers.
The opening scene of the film has initiated this elaborate parallelism and has also made the audience an anxious witness to a total picture of which no single character is aware. As soon as Linnaker and his female companion are blown up, we become aware of an impending sexual chaos that threatens to destroy the Vargas couple. At the very moment when Mike debates civil rights with Quinlan, Susie is being led by “Pancho” (as she calls him) to meet Uncle Joe Grandi, whose brother has recently been sent to prison by the Pan American Narcotics Commission. In a scene charged with equal portions of menace and grotesque comedy, Grandi threatens Susie with a gun, pokes a phallic cigar in her face, and then licks his lips as she exits—this last gesture a foreshadowing of the images that will precede and follow her “rape”: “Pancho” will lick his lips before attacking her, and she will wake from a drugged sleep to find Uncle Joe’s head above her face, his dead tongue sticking out of his mouth.
Figures 6.8–6.10: A dissolve demonstrates the parallel between Menzies and Susie.
Figure 6
.11: Susie’s point of view when she awakes to the dead Uncle Joe hanging over her.
Throughout the early episodes Susie remains self-confident, her anger edged with a castrating wit. She tells “Pancho” that her husband, a “great big official,” is going to knock out his teeth, and when Uncle Joe pokes his cigar at her like Edward G. Robinson, she accuses him of playing “Little Caesar.” When she returns to her “honeymoon hotel” and finds the Grandi boys shining the beams of flashlights through her windows, she responds by throwing a light bulb at them. Nevertheless, the symbolic sexual violence mounts in intensity and is suggested even in her absence. For example, when a Grandi killer throws acid at Vargas, the chemical misses its target, sending a poster of Zita (Joi Lansing) up in smoke. The burning poster is an echo of the explosion we have just seen (as Stephen Heath remarks in his commentary on the film, Zita has literally become a “sizzling stripper”), but it is also an indication of what lies in store for Susie; both she and Zita are bosomy blondes, and we have just heard Quinlan describe them both as “Janes.”
During the remainder of the film, Mike and Susie Vargas live through the worst traumas of racist imaginings, becoming victims of Quinlan’s bigotry, Uncle Joe’s revenge, and the Grandi boys’ desire to do violence against gringo womanhood. Irony is piled upon irony as the many parallels in the plot give the characters a kind of displaced relationship, like figures in a dream. Susie, the white progressive who has married into the Mexico City bourgeoisie, spends her honeymoon being assaulted by a Los Robles dope pusher (as Heath has noted, he is played by an actor named Valentin de Vargas). Drugged and transported back to town, she is spread out on a seedy hotel bed, where she becomes a surrogate for Quinlan’s wife, enabling him to act out the capture and strangulation of her “killer.” Quinlan himself, of course, becomes one of the murderers he hates. Mike Vargas, like Quinlan before him, has to suffer the debasement of his wife by a “mixture” of races (even sexes), and Susie has to endure a nightmare that might have come straight from her mother’s darkest fears. Nearly all the boundaries between good and evil threaten to dissolve, although the film’s moral argument remains clear.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 23