by Simon Callow
Part of the exhilaration Welles felt while shooting Touch of Evil was due to his having a superb technical crew at his disposal, who could handle anything he threw at them. He and the cinematographer, Russell Metty, were old colleagues: Metty had been a ‘contrast consultant’ on Citizen Kane as far back as 1941; later, on The Magnificent Ambersons, he had shot some of the additional material required by RKO while Welles was still in Brazil; and in 1946 he had been Welles’s director of photography on his most overtly commercial picture, The Stranger. Metty’s work on the film, culminating in the superb Grand Guignol finale at the top of the clock tower, is very striking, especially in his bold carving-up of shadow and light; not for nothing had he once been a contrast consultant. It was with The Stranger that Metty had come into his own as a cinematographer: thrilled by his swiftness, impressed by his ideas, Welles had given him his head. After The Stranger, Metty formed a long and fruitful partnership with the German-American director Douglas Sirk, as different a director from Welles as could possibly be imagined; Metty evolved a distinct style for him, emphasising emotional ambience and shooting in colour; but, reunited with Welles, he immediately fell back into his stride, returning to black-and-white with all his old mastery.
Their collaboration on Touch of Evil is on a par with Welles’s relationship with Greg Toland on Kane: creative, inventive, playful, entirely mutual. Between them, Metty and Welles summon up a definitive world, one of the greatest of all moviescapes, integrating an expressionist vocabulary of low and skewed angles and distorting lenses into the more humdrum vernacular of cop movies, plunging the audience into the characters’ nightmarish experience. There was genuine give-and-take between director and cinematographer: Welles, for example, always acknowledged that the idea of shooting the film’s classic opening sequence in a nearly continuous tracking shot had been Metty’s; he immediately saw its potential and pushed it as far as it could go. And, as with Kane, Welles’s delight in the medium and his refusal to be confined by any perceived limitations is embodied in the very fabric of the film, so that generations of film-makers have been inspired by it to make movies themselves: murky though the world it discloses may be, every frame of Touch of Evil celebrates the art of film.
There was excitement around the project from the beginning; actors queued up to be in it. Heston as Vargas, of course, had been cast by Universal; as was Susan Vargas, Janet Leigh, who had been proving herself in a multitude of genres, not least in romantic vehicles with her then-husband Tony Curtis. She gave herself eagerly to the experience of working with Welles: ‘It started with rehearsals,’ she said. ‘We rehearsed two weeks prior to shooting, which was unusual. We rewrote most of the dialogue, all of us, which was also unusual, and Mr Welles always wanted our input. It was a collective effort, and there was such a surge of participation, of creativity, of energy. You could feel the pulse growing as we rehearsed.’8 To a large extent, Welles framed the roles of the Vargases around the actors he had been given. He encouraged Heston – tall, athletic and commanding, but oddly inflexible – to look as Mexican as he could; the effect is striking, though not notably Hispanic: Heston remains merely tall, athletic, commanding and oddly inflexible. But Welles integrates him brilliantly into the texture of the film, keeping him moving as much as possible, part of the group, denying him any dramatic solo moments; Leigh, who broke her arm before shooting began, but gamely carried on, is fresh and sassy and very credibly in love with her husband (alas, Heston refrains from showing comparable tenderness towards her). They are the innocents in a world of desperadoes and oddballs.
Here Welles drew around him an astonishing repertory of character actors, or in some cases just characters, a troupe to match the one he assembled for Mr Arkadin. As the would-be gang-leader, Uncle Joe Grandi, Welles’s chum Akim Tamiroff (an Arkadin veteran, of course) is as richly layered as ever, masterfully pitching his performance between slapstick – with an ever-shifting wig and uncertain command over his gang – and genuine menace; Dennis Weaver, fresh from starring on television as Chester in Gunsmoke, presents a nervy, twitchy night-watchman, who seems to be in perpetual motion, dancing a St Vitus’s dance in and out of the motel, alternately appalled and attracted by Leigh’s Susan Vargas. The character of the night-watchman was a late addition to the script, and Welles encouraged Weaver to push himself into new territory as an actor. His scenes were for the most part improvised, but he was anxious to adhere to what he and Welles had discussed in terms of character:
I told Orson I was having trouble staying in the room and still being true to the selection we had decided on. I had an impulse to run and he asked what was stopping me. I said according to the script I’ve got to stay in the room. He told me the script must yield to the truth . . . ‘so run!’9
The performance sometimes tips over into pantomime – as does Tamiroff’s occasionally – which suggests a dimension of the film that Welles chose not to push as far as he might have done. But throughout the film there is always a sense of freedom, of spontaneity. ‘You felt you were inventing something as you went along,’ Janet Leigh remembered, fondly. ‘Mr Welles wanted to seize every moment. He didn’t want one bland moment. He made you feel you were involved in a wonderful event that was happening before your eyes.’
Ray Collins and Jo Cotten bring up the rear on behalf of the old Mercury company – Cotten as a police surgeon, kitted out with spectacles and a luxuriant moustache, which disguise him as effectively as the same props aged him in Citizen Kane – not at all, that is. Collins is his usual credible self; and it is a moment of note when the three of them (Collins, Cotten and Welles) share a screen again after all those years. Mercedes McCambridge, roped in at the last moment, is quite unnerving as the seemingly gay biker in the sequence in the motel in which the gang menaces Susan. Welles had suddenly summoned the actress to the set one day. ‘Did I have a pair of black slacks and a black sweater? Sure I had. Did I have a black leather jacket? I said I wouldn’t be caught dead in a black leather jacket. He said never mind, come anyhow. I went.’10 He put her in the make-up chair, cut her hair, rubbed black shoe-polish into it till it turned into a mass of black ringlets, blackened a small mole on the side of her face and rubbed more polish into her eyebrows. He told her to affect a gruff Mexican accent, burst into the motel room with the gang and say that she would hang around and watch. It took one take; she was back home in Bel Air by 4 p.m. that afternoon. This, too, is Welles in his element, joyously playing with the best electric train set a boy ever had: being able to summon actors and mould them into pleasing and interesting shapes. It’s his toy theatre come back to life; it’s him and his juvenile thespians at Todd all over again. And it is an integral part of the brilliance of Touch of Evil.
Luxury casting beyond the dreams of Mammon comes in the form of Zsa Zsa Gabor as the hostess of a bar briefly visited, and, supremely, in Marlene Dietrich’s Tana, the bordello keeper. Of indeterminate nationality, she seems to be the only employee in the place, impassively dealing out the truth, purveying a sense of fatalism without judgement: the very quality Dietrich expressed so potently in her stage act. This is her in Josef von Sternberg mode, with black wig (it had been made for Elizabeth Taylor) and a trim, timeless body. She is somehow detached from the action and yet full of brilliantly subdued emotion, providing a plangent descant to the turmoil and destruction all around her. She was rightly proud of her delivery of the famous last lines of the film: ‘He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?’, which places the whole drama that has preceded it sub specie aeternitatis. But for Quinlan, Tana represents some sort of past happiness – so distantly past that there can be no memory of it, just an association. The idiotic pianola tune that invariably heralds and accompanies her appearances takes Quinlan into a dream of that prelapsarian state of innocence and happiness which lies at the heart of so much of Welles’s work: Kane’s carefree tobogganing childhood, the Ambersons’ golden days of wealth and elegance, Michael O’Ha
ra’s life before he set eyes on Elsa Bannister, Falstaff’s reverie of Merrie England – and Welles’s very own and private Eden, the hotel at Grand Detour, near Springfield, Illinois, the demi-paradise over which (in his soft-focused memory) his father had presided. Just such a pianola might have played there as tinkles away in Tana’s establishment, recycling the same idiotic tune over and over again: the heart’s history arrested, stopped as surely as Miss Havisham’s clocks, never moving forward, forever stuck in a groove.
Dietrich brings an unfathomable depth to what has passed between her and Quinlan. We can know nothing of it, of those whole weeks at a time when he would stay there, drunk. Perhaps there is something more personal lurking in the background, something between the two actors themselves. Dietrich told Esquire magazine that she had been ‘crazy’ about Welles in the Forties, when he was sawing her up in The Mercury Wonder Show. ‘I was just crazy about him – we were great friends – but nothing . . . because Orson doesn’t like blonde women. He only likes dark women. And suddenly when he saw me in this dark wig, he looked at me with new eyes. Was this Marlene?’ Harry Lime-like, her effect on the film is out of all proportion to the amount of screen time she occupies.
It is not rare in Welles’s films for one actor to break away from the overall gesture of the film to embody a distilled human truth, functioning as a kind of choric figure: in The Magnificent Ambersons it is Agnes Moorehead, in The Lady from Shanghai it is Glenn Anders. In Touch of Evil there are two actors who do this – Dietrich, and Joseph Calleia, playing Quinlan’s deceived colleague, Menzies. Calleia’s haunted features figure more and more prominently on screen as the truth about Quinlan increasingly dawns on him, along with the knowledge that he must betray him. Welles spoke beautifully about Calleia, whom he had seen on the Broadway stage when he was a boy, and who, though he rarely played a leading part, was, Welles believed, one of the best actors in the business. ‘You play next to him,’ Welles said, ‘and you just feel the thing that you do with a big actor – this dynamo going on.’11 Calleia’s abundant inner life casts a growing spell over the film as it comes to its climax, bringing to vividly personal life Welles’s sempiternal subject: betrayal.
Quinlan, Touch of Evil’s betrayed anti-hero, is one of Welles’s most extreme physical characterisations. There is no suggestion of bulk, either in the original novel or in Monash’s screenplay; he is simply lame as a result of a bullet in the leg, a bullet intended for his fellow-officer, Menzies. In Welles’s re-imaging his reformed alcoholism has driven him to seek consolation in candy bars, which he must have been consuming by the wagonload. He’s so fat that Tana doesn’t recognise him at first. ‘You’re a mess, honey,’ she tells him, factually, when she does. Bud Westmore, from the distinguished dynasty of Hollywood make-up artists, had devised with Welles as gross and ugly a visage for Quinlan as possible, with Welles’s large eyes reduced to little rodent-like peepers, his own nose covered with a long ski-slope of a conk, the face weighed down with puffy jowls, the mouth at once slobbery and slitty. Welles was far from slim at the time, but he added massive padding to his bulk. This hobbling man-mountain, this slag-heap of iniquity – it demands a Shakespearean vocabulary of insults to do justice to him. And, indeed, Quinlan is a dystopian Falstaff, one who – unlike the Fat Knight – is not witty in himself, nor is ‘the cause that wit is in other men’: he is beyond wit, deserving only of Tana’s deep astonishment. But this man is dangerous; dangerous above all because he places his intuition above the evidence. He is every cop, like Officer X, who has come to believe that he is justice. He is not corrupt in the financial sense: his corruption is a form of vanity, the vanity of those who believe themselves infallible. And he is also a man out for revenge: revenge on the race that killed his wife, a loss that we are given to understand has destroyed his life. All of this is brilliantly, vividly conveyed – spelled out, one might say – in Welles’s performance, which, invariably shot from below, is overwhelmingly impressive.
And yet it does not stir us, as Calleia or Dietrich stir us; it does not move us, or even provoke us to anger – ‘such things should not be!’ It is monumental in a way that the performances in Ivan the Terrible (equally huge, equally schematic, it would seem) are not: with Eisenstein, the living human being is still at the centre of the performance. Welles’s Quinlan is an unforgettable portrait of corruption, physical and moral, but it is not a living one. If there is an actor whom he resembles, it is Dietrich’s old sparring partner in The Blue Angel, Emil Jannings, a performer likewise given to creating extraordinary shapes that he filled, not with lived life, but with a wealth of detail and a selection of off-the-peg emotions. It is worth recollecting Walter Kerr’s words about Welles’s King Lear: ‘every effect is a bequest of Mr Welles’s inventive but much too conniving mind. His heart seems to have nothing to say.’ A year later, at a press conference in Brussels, Welles made a remarkable admission: ‘I do not feel myself,’ he said, ‘essentially a cinema actor; my faculties as an actor are better in the theatre. I have to make an enormous effort to create the appropriate cinematic effect which in a true cinema actor is instinct. I have to go through a complex mental process to get the effect Gary Cooper gets when he breathes, that Raimu gets just by his presence, and what’s more, I’m not even sure I succeed.’12 What is curious is that the film Welles made is the opposite of his performance: mercurial, fluid, inventive, constantly morphing stylistically in dream-like fashion.
Once Welles’s creativity was engaged, he followed it to the limits. He had increasingly shifted shooting away from the studio and out to Venice or to bleak, flat Palmdale in northern California (where most of the motel sequences are shot); on an impulse, he decided one rainy night to shoot a sequence in the hotel elevator, getting the athletic Heston to race up the stairs in real time to meet it at the end of its journey (the first-ever such shot in a film, according to Heston, a great Guinness Book of Records man). ‘Not tough to do today, with battery powered sound and camera,’ notes Heston in In the Arena, ‘but a real killer shot in 1957, with light and sound cables hanging three stories down the elevator shaft.’ The same night, Welles and Heston were relieving their bladders in the hotel’s basement cellar: ‘Wouldn’t this be a great place to do that scene in the file room with you and Joe Calleia?’ said Welles. Zipping up, Heston replied, ‘It sure would. But isn’t that scheduled for Friday, back in the studio? They’ll have the set built by now. Besides, Joe isn’t even called tonight. It’s two a.m.; he’ll be dead asleep. We’ve got three more pages to shoot up on the third floor anyway. That’ll take the rest of the night.’ ‘Nonsense! He’ll be better if he’s confused. That’s what the scene’s about,’ roared Welles, his eyes gleaming.13
Calleia was sent for; the two remaining set-ups were quickly despatched, and they shot the scene, with a groggy, baffled Calleia, to superb effect: Heston drives the scene forward, as Calleia drifts in and out of focus. This is a kind of Method filming, the only sort of Method-anything that Welles countenanced. The cellar of the hotel, moreover, proves to be a superb location, a sort of shiny Fritz Lang prison, like something out of Metropolis. The final sequence of the film, as Vargas follows Quinlan and Menzies over and under bridges and through water, his recording device in his hand, and the sharp angles of the derricks soaring up into the black night, evokes the world of the Piranesi dungeons that Welles had hoped to summon up for his King Lear at the City Center.
They had shot fifteen nights one after another, but, swept along by exhilaration at what they were doing, everyone held up. Word had spread to the front office, as it always will do; Heston reported that you had to come early to get a seat for the showing of the rushes. Even the Universal press office seemed to have got the hang of it. Their initial press release rejoices in Welles’s unconventional approach, telling the whole legendary story, more or less accurately: the first day’s shooting, the opening tracking shot, the relocation of the scene in the DA’s office, the choice of Venice as location.
This was a new way of writing about Welles, less concerned with who he was than with what he did, and how he did it. The press release continued:
While construction and destruction was in progress, Orson, the minute-miser, called for an Éclair camerette, had it loaded with 400 feet of film and, by means of this ingenious hand camera, had himself, ‘Chuck’ Heston, Ray Collins and Harry Shannon shot entering the elevator, riding up in it and exiting it to walk down the hall. The fact that he had been the first director to successfully do a long take in a moving elevator was too time-consuming for Welles to ponder. Outside, a cast automobile waited for the precedent-breaker to make history again. He prepared to shoot a chase scene without a cameraman.15
If this narrative, especially with its emphasis on Welles the ‘minute-miser’ and Welles the ‘precedent-breaker’, had established itself, the studio bosses might have been a great deal more relaxed about him. ‘Improvising a signal knocking system from himself to the operator, he took off, careening through the community in a manner reminiscent of the old silent days.’ It is Chaplin who is being invoked here, but it could have been Griffith, early DeMille, von Stroheim, Abel Gance: as always, Welles was trying to replicate the high creative energy of the early days of a medium that had become stale. Universal’s anonymous press officer can’t have been the only person in Hollywood to get the point of Welles: he even gets the camaraderie on the set, especially the complicity between leading man and director. ‘Some carefree, inspired directors re-write scenes between takes. Obeying his dramatic intuition, Welles ad-libbed much of his re-write in the middle of a take. Only the most adept trouper could survive these rigors opposite this mercurial individual. Such a trouper’, the press release adds, ‘is Charlton Heston.’