From Othello and Citizen Kane to cartoon robots and frozen-pea commercials, stellar early highlights to a later fall from grace, Orson Welles had been there and bought all the t-shirts.
Welles was something of a calamity magnet, leaving in his considerable wake a slew of half-finished projects, never-started ones and several amusing adverts for wine and dog food.
The Magnificent Ambersons? Butchered by the studio. The Merchant Of Venice? Negatives mysteriously stolen. The Other Side Of The Wind (what would have been his final film, about a director attempting to raise the funds to complete his final film)? Ensnared in legal and editing tangles for the last four decades.
At least the legendary outtake reel of him getting soused while shooting an ad for Paul Masson ‘champagne’ is still on YouTube – a drunken, three minute encapsulation of all that is brilliant and tragic about the man. Look it up.
But, as recounted on the extras to this new edition, Welles only had himself to blame when it came to the Byzantine wranglings that tainted Touch Of Evil – his grimy noir that would have been, so legend has it, the great auteur’s lost masterpiece, were it not hacked about against his wishes by ham-fisted studio charlatans.
Finding memo
Strangely enough, it was the same thing that undid Gilliam that resulted in Touch Of Evil’s complicated birth. After shooting on time and to budget, Welles promptly wandered off into the wilds of Mexico to embark on an adaptation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote – leaving the final cut of Touch Of Evil in the hands of the producers, who employed jobbing B-movie director Harry Keller to jerry-rig a theatrical version using the rough cut and some re-shot sequences.
It was this release – with its heavy-handed exposition and garbled plot progression – that prompted Welles’ famous 58-page memo, a potted set of instructions as to how he felt the film ought to be assembled. Though it’s fair to say that if he’d been there to cut the film in the first place, such corrections wouldn’t have been necessary.
Still, it was Welles’ “pleading memo to make it play as a more successful, commercial film,” according to producer Rick Schmidlin, that prompted the latter’s own 1998 restoration project. Given that the rough cut no longer exists, the ’98 version has since been acknowledged as the closest to Welles’ intentions we’re ever likely to get.
It’s all detailed in the pair of 20-minute documentaries included here – Bringing Evil To Life, a solid Making Of, and Evil Lost And Found, detailing a tortuous 30-year post-production gestation. They’re both cribbed from quality, and somewhat dated, interviews, if the presence of such late, lamented luminaries as Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Robert Wise is anything to go by.
The commentaries are better value, though. FX Feeney’s track on the 1958 version in particular is a detailed (if florid) appreciation of what he sees as the “most energetic” cut of the film – “A western with neckties, lapels and trenchcoats.”
Eureka’s cinephile-friendly Blu-ray release, which does a decent job polishing up the muffled sound and picture quality typical of Welles’ notoriously cheap production values, also includes commentary-garnished versions of the 1998 ‘Memo Restoration’, as well as the ropey 1975 ‘Director’s Cut’ which, though it includes more footage, is anything but.
The big sleazy
Something of a Franken-film then, but even in its inferior guises Touch Of Evil is arguably one of the best noir pictures ever made, a textbook example of Welles’ abilities as writer, director and actor. A conversion of Whit Masterson’s unremarkable pulp novel, Badge Of Evil, into a stylish, supremely taut, technically slick and brilliantly acted thriller, it’s a classic portrayal of ingrained prejudice and enormous egos coming to blows.
Small wonder it required no less presence than Charlton Heston, cast as Mexican vice officer Mike Vargas, an unstoppable force pitted against an immovable (in more than one sense) object: Welles’ Captain Hank Quinlan. The latter’s an elephantine, corrupt, cigar-sucking sleazebag, who attempts to frame a Mexican youth for the cross-border murder of a US property magnate.
Vargas is a clean-cut dandy, married to apple-pie American Susan (Janet Leigh); by contrast, Quinlan is an unredeemed racist with an unerring detective’s instinct.
But the film becomes less about the crime itself than the can of worms regarding Quinlan’s methods and the past it opens; the explosive conflict between the two men renders the original crime a mere spark to the ensuing bonfire.
The film’s famous three-minute opening crane shot – following the progress of a car bomb across the US-Mexico border – remains technically jaw-dropping. It also serves as an elegantly neat illustration of the film’s elaborate set-up, as the Vargases’ honeymoon is curtailed by an investigation that crosses many borders – physical, psychological, temporal.
It’s a film that’s both ahead of its time – it contains the first scene shot inside a moving car – and yet wonderfully dated, from its OTT depiction of hopped-up hep cat delinquents to the theatrical flourish typical of Welles at his best.
In a way, though, it’s all elegant window-dressing for a classic Welles turn – magnetic, repugnant, monumental. “He was some kind of a man,” as Marlene Dietrich iconically puts it at the close. And it’s some kind of movie.
DVD Extras:
• Commentaries
• Docs
• 1958 theatrical cut
• 1975 preview version
• 1998 restoration
