The expressionist camera work during the motel “rape” suggests an even crueler irony: Susie has been forced to confront her own private demons. We see the beginning of the rape from the woman’s point of view as a succession of hideous, glassy-eyed faces stare down into the camera and whisper to one another. Susie’s WASPish innocence is set off against the vivid stereotypes of a racist and sadomasochist imagination, as if the film were deliberately calling up fears that a respectable marriage between the “good” characters cannot repress. But if the camera represents Susie, it also represents the audience, who are made to experience the nightmare from Susie’s point of view. Here Welles is taking one of his most considerable risks, because despite the fact that the film is made with a progressive attitude, it violates the decorum of nearly all the liberal thesis films of the late fifties. It forces us, through action with a hallucinatory power that almost parodies Griffith, to imagine a white woman being raped by a Mexican thug. Indeed the fish-eye close-up of “Pancho,” who gazes into the camera and flicks his tongue like a serpent, has a strong though probably unconscious resemblance to the close-ups of Battling Burrows and Cheng Huan in Broken Blossoms: in both cases the aggressive male looks directly into the lens, his features distorted wildly; in both cases we cut to a fearful, golden-haired girl who cringes on a bed in a position rather like Susan Alexander kneeling before Kane. Welles has even changed Leigh out of her seductive underclothes and dressed her in an innocent little girl’s smock, the least provocative costume she wears in the movie.
Figure 6.12: “I wanna watch.” Mercedes McCambridge as a butch leader of a gang.
Figure 6.13: Susie in the rape scene.
Figure 6.14: “Pancho” (Valentin de Vargas) licks his lips.
Disturbing as the scene is, there are elements of relief from the tension; audiences usually chuckle uncomfortably when they recognize Mercedes McCambridge as one of the attackers, and the anti-naturalistic exaggeration of the faces results in a peculiar kind of comedy. Stephen Heath has said that the whole scene is “laughably fantastic,” as if it were being viewed from the perspective of the neurotic motel “night man” (Dennis Weaver); nevertheless, the farcically extreme style is part of the ironic intent, and Welles is far from letting us escape to a safe distance. If we are going to accept the film’s vision of a racist society, we first have to rid ourselves of liberal complacencies. Just as we are made to acknowledge the humanity of the bigot Quinlan, so we are made to experience the sexual terror that lies behind his racism. At this juncture the film’s eroticism takes on interesting connections with its political argument, requiring us to distinguish between feelings and judgments, never allowing us to fall prey to an easy righteousness. In fact the ironies of the film are so powerful that it is difficult to accept a return to simple good/bad distinctions at the end. Susie is supposed to be “clean” (she hasn’t even been drugged or raped, we are told), while the dead Quinlan floats in an oily lake, but the acceptable limits of melodrama have been stretched so far that nearly all the characters have been touched by the evil of Los Robles. Hence the final embrace between Mike and Susie looks out of place, too obviously a Hollywood device. “It’s all over,” Mike says, and they speed off to safer territories. Their convertible, however, looks very like the one Rudy Linnaker was driving at the beginning of the movie. It may be that the parallel between the two cars is a simple case of studio economics, especially since Universal had a merchandising agreement with Chrysler Corporation, but then again, economics sometimes reveals latent meanings that no one consciously intended. Whatever the cause, Touch of Evil never quite restores its world to a comfortable equilibrium.
III
These many dramatic and psychological ironies result in a kind of maliciousness, a satiric vertigo that is as much a matter of style as of script. Indeed the vertigo becomes a literal physical property of the film, and what is most difficult to convey in either static images or words is the continual movement of the scenery. Russell Metty and John Russell have provided Welles with the technical expertise he needs, and Welles in turn has never seemed more conscious of the peculiar dramatic rhythms created by the wide-angle lens. For example, the closing sequence of Vargas pursuing Quinlan and Menzies, which is shot from every possible angle, makes no spatial sense whatsoever: it is unified by a dizzying, nearly unceasing swirl, the camera and actors turning, rising, falling in the night air as if they were swept along by a maelstrom.
The melodramatic plot also gives Welles plenty of excuse to photograph action; this is easily his most brutal picture, filled with references to explosion and obliteration that are entirely true to the atmosphere of the South in the late fifties. Frequently the camera “acts” along with Vargas, as in the scene where he is informed that Susie has been charged with murder: an extremely large telephoto close-up is at the left of the screen, the right side of Vargas’s face masked by the back of Schwartz’s head. “Murder!” Vargas says, and the camera zooms in, the screen going black and then opening on a wide-angle traveling shot that moves down the corridors of the Los Robles jail. Vargas’s shadowy figure is in the foreground, the camera slowing as he runs down the hallway, fusing two separate mechanical operations and the blocking of an actor into one continuous movement. Earlier, when Vargas lifts one of the Grandis by the scruff of the neck and carries him down to the end of a bar, the camera makes the audience directly experience the force of his rage: it tracks suddenly back and away from the two figures as if sucked by a vacuum. For a moment Vargas is lost in the smoky gloom of the nightclub, but before the camera movement has ended he starts forward out of the haze, carrying his victim toward the lens with superhuman energy, the whole room scattering in front of him.
What is still more interesting about Touch of Evil is the way it frequently explodes the notion that style ought to imitate “content,” creating an “organic” vision. For even while the story and the fetishistic imagery work to stimulate the audience’s involvement, the sheer eccentricity of Welles’s technique and casting often demands to be appreciated for its own sake, as the “author’s” artifice. If, as Andrew Sarris has said, Touch of Evil is a “movie that makes you rethink what a movie should be,” it is not simply because it has a complicated morality and psychology; what is most impressive is the way the film uses a fairly unorthodox form to convey its meanings. Except in his preference for location shooting, flat lighting in the daylight exteriors, and music that usually emanates from realistic sources, Welles has ignored most of the rules of movie naturalism. His idea is to make a world that is both grittily accurate and surreal, characters that are both plausible and weirdly out of key, a film that maintains a level of serious intent even while it calls attention to itself as a grotesque joke.
In his previous American work Welles had shot at least a few scenes with a quiet, eye-level camera, but here virtually everything is photographed from radical angles, with a lens so extreme it resembles a fun-house mirror. This extremism often becomes deliberately silly, particularly in the acting, which is sometimes exaggerated to the point of hysteria. One could cite many examples: Uncle Joe and his boys dashing through the early morning streets and squabbling like the Three Stooges (Joe loses his wig, which is turned into a comic prop); Menzies expressing grief over Quinlan by dropping his head flat down on a table and speaking in operatic despair; the hot-rod gang twitching around, snapping their fingers like the chorus in a television skit. But the most obvious instance is Dennis Weaver, whose performance as the crazy Mirador Motel night clerk begs to be contrasted with Tony Perkins in Psycho. Consider, for example, the scene from the Hitchcock film where Perkins first encounters Janet Leigh. The shot has an extraordinary number of things in common with Touch of Evil. Leigh is featured in both movies, and the basic plot situations are much the same; Welles’s camera operator John Russell had become Hitchcock’s photographer, and Robert Clatworthy helped design the sets for both pictures. But the differences are equally striking, so obvious as to become perfect indexes to the c
ontrasting temperaments of the directors. Hitchcock wants to create an atmosphere of normality that will be disrupted by horror; as a result, Perkins behaves like a shy, slightly nervous young man, and his encounter with Leigh is shot in classic symmetry. There are, to be sure, many subtleties in the image—for example, Leigh is repeatedly photographed against mirrors—nevertheless, the acting and photography seem perfectly natural, never obtrusively “dramatic.”
Figure 6.15: Janet Leigh and Tony Perkins in Psycho.
Figure 6.16: Janet Leigh and Dennis Weaver in Touch of Evil.
In contrast is the way Welles and Dennis Weaver have chosen to stage a roughly equivalent scene: Weaver’s behavior is pushed as far out of proportion as Welles’s wide-angle photography. He has been allowed to use a whining accent rather like the one he made famous as Chester in Gunsmoke, but Welles told him “never let anyone get in front of you.” As a result, he plays nearly every scene on a diagonal with the other actors, usually dashing about in quickstep, his head jerking from side to side in what Manny Farber once described as “spastic woodpecker effects.” In this scene he expresses his fear of women by clinging to a wall, and in a few moments, unable to control his panic, he will dash outside and speak to Leigh through an open window. Later, when he is confronted with the Grandis, he has an attack of heebiejeebies, and he screams in terror when he discovers a leftover joint in Leigh’s abandoned room. Outside the motel after the rape scene, we see him in the most stylized pose of all, embracing a windblown tree and babbling like a Shakespearian fool.
Nearly all the performances in Touch of Evil are done in this broad, roughly expressionist form; only Heston and Leigh use the techniques of “normal” movie acting, partly because they are meant to be out of place, like unwilling witnesses who have chanced into a crazy house. (Even they, however, are extravagant presences—Heston cast against type as a Mexican and Leigh made so sexy in her role as a sweet wife that she becomes unreal.) Elsewhere the film offers a heyday for character actors, who have been allowed to defy the notion that they should not emote but simply “be.” As we have seen in earlier chapters, Welles is almost alone among American moviemakers in his love for a theatrical intensity, a “hot” style of acting that has more in common with Griffith or Eisenstein than with the tradition of talking pictures. Consequently he relishes the opportunity to people his film with an assortment of international types in offbeat costumes, players who scurry about making broad gestures and yelling their lines. He has a keen sense of how these various bodies react against one another within the frame of an individual shot, and he tries for an exaggerated, highly choreographed effect that produces a surreal comedy.
The best example of the technique is the pivotal episode in Sanchez’s apartment, which is photographed in three elaborate shots, the action broken only when Vargas exits to cross the street and telephone Susie. Throughout, the actors are in continual motion, the camera drifting in and out of three rooms. Sanchez’s apartment sometimes threatens to become as crowded as the shipboard room in A Night at the Opera, yet the camera movement remains fairly unobtrusive, the compositions changing in size with the fluidity of invisible editing. The wide-angle lens enables Welles to take in a broad playing area even while it distorts space and gives the feeling of giant heads swimming in and out of close-up. Everywhere the lighting is relatively simple, lacking the romantic chiaroscuro of the ordinary studio film; it originates from a few sources, usually from a low angle that casts the shadows of the actors on the ceiling and gives their faces sallow, demonic looks.
Welles and Heston dominate the space in the room, their movements slow and powerful, their voices held to a low key until they confront each other in a tight composition and Vargas shouts, “You framed that boy, Captain! Framed him!” Heston is ramrod stiff, his head cocked slightly, his chin jutting out, trying to remain a neutral “observer”; Quinlan, on the other hand, is weary; he moves with great effort (“I’m an old man,” he tells Marcia Linnaker) except when he suddenly deals Sanchez a vicious slap. One of these two kingly presences usually occupies a central spot in the frame, surrounded by tinier figures who rush nervously about, speaking at a higher volume. Sanchez (Victor Millan) is angry and distraught, wringing his hands and virtually jumping in frustration; Menzies is wiry and puppylike, moving urgently at Quinlan’s suggestion; Uncle Joe Grandi is a chubby, quick little figure who tries to stay out of the picture, always talking with his hands. Now and then one of the smaller players inserts himself between Quinlan and Vargas, gesticulating wildly, as in the image shown here.
Figure 6.17: Vargas, Sanchez (Victor Millan), Quinlan and others in Sanchez’s apartment.
The actors bite at one another’s lines, their speeches contrasting in pitch and tone so that they take on a strangely rhythmic, musical counterpoint. For example, the dialogue that accompanies figure 6.17 goes as follows:
SANCHEZ (gazing wide-eyed at Quinlan, who avoids his stare): Where did you find this?
QUINLAN (pained and weary, in a low voice): Right here in your love nest.
SANCHEZ (shrill): Where?
MENZIES (offscreen, shouting in a child’s derisive sing-song): Right where you had it stashed, of course!
SANCHEZ (more shrill): What are you trying to do?
QUINLAN (low, tired): We’re trying to strap you to the electric chair.
MENZIES (at the top of his voice): We don’t like it when innocent people are blown to jelly in our town!
QUINLAN (quiet, almost dreamy): Yes, an old lady on Main Street last night picked up a shoe . . . The shoe had a foot in it . . .
SANCHEZ (pleads with Vargas in Spanish, his voice whining).
VARGAS (overlapping Sanchez): You’ll have to stop him yourself . . .
QUINLAN (to himself, overlapping Sanchez): He can talk Hindu for all I care.
The scene is vividly overwrought, like a bad dream. It even generates an obsessive, darkly comic motif involving shoes and feet: Sanchez works in a shoe shop (“the best shoe clerk that store ever had”) and has met Marcia Linnaker in the course of his job (“I’ve been at her feet ever since”); he is charged with a crime that left an old lady’s foot and shoe on Main Street, and the evidence has been planted in an empty shoebox in his bathroom. Jokes like this give the film part of its crazy energy, a delirium that is intensified by the distorting lens, the continual movement of actors and camera, the array of strange facial types, and the fantastic interplay of voices.
It is remarkable that Welles was able to give life to expressionist theatrics so late in the fifties, when a great many movies were being shot on location, and when dramatists like Paddy Chayefsky and William Inge were being praised for their “realism.” In a sense Touch of Evil is the last flowering of artful crime melodrama from the forties, a style that survives in our own day only in the form of nostalgic imitations. Debased as the world of the film is, the actors seem driven by beautiful demons, and the shadowy rooms and buildings retain a certain voluptuous romanticism. (Welles may be the only German expressionist who is also authentically attracted to Latin cultures and who is able to appropriate their “feel” to his style.) In another sense, however, Welles is breaking with the film noir, making Los Robles too decadent by far, extending the artifice of the film to such a degree that it becomes a new style, a foreshadowing of depressed, bombed-out landscapes of movies like The French Connection. Perhaps because he has never taken thrillers very seriously, he exaggerates everything to the point of absurdity. He uses “cameo” players to break the surface of the illusion, and he enters the film as “our local police celebrity,” having Joseph Cotten look offscreen to announce his arrival. Even when he is creating his strongest emotional effects—as in the scenes with Tanya—he loads the movie with references to himself and Dietrich. It doesn’t matter that both characters wear makeup; in fact Dietrich’s black hair and dark skin are meant to resemble one of those fantastic costumes she wore in the Von Sternberg musical numbers, and Welles has photographed her in soft focus amid wre
aths of smoke, in the manner of her earlier films. She keeps her German accent, and when she looks at Welles and remarks, “You’re a mess, honey,” the players separate from the fiction altogether.
In other ways, too, the bordello scenes are self-referential; for example, Tanya says that her business has become so diversified that “we show movies.” Such moments might be regarded as indulgence (to an extent they are), but the film’s surface is so exciting that the director has earned them. Hence the scenes work at two levels, as if Welles were speaking out of his own age and thwarted idealism, acknowledging that the film is an expression of his own psychology and his desire to make fun of Hollywood. He sets the audience in an odd relation to the events, making us aware of the spectacle even while we are immersed in it. When Dietrich walks off into the darkness of the Los Robles oil fields at the end of the movie, turning back to the audience to say “Adios,” we are asked to regard everything as a magic trick, a form of play. It has been only a movie, Dietrich suggests, and she has noted that it doesn’t matter what you say about people. But the very casualness of the gesture tends to heighten the wit, the satiric insight, and the imaginative power that have gone before.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 24