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Touch of Evil
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Undoubtedly
the two most abused words in the lexicon of the contemporary film industry are director's cut.
This term
evokes a dream of finally seeing certain great films in the exact pristine
state that their makers intended them – without producer or studio
interference, government censorship or the multitude of other vicissitudes that
shape how a movie finally appears on screen.
These days,
almost any alternate version of a film is sneakily touted as a director's cut.
An early assemblage of Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946) was released in the mid ‘90s
– a fascinating document but hardly the ultimate incarnation of its maker's
intentions. Videos and laserdiscs of films where the image is simply cleaned up
a little – or previously discarded material is now tacked as an afterthought –
masquerade as director's cuts.
In my
favourite case, the local World Movies cable channel showed a version of Irma Vep (1996) that was unaccountably missing its final scene, due to a laboratory
error. When alerted of this mistake, the channel promptly substituted a full
version of the film – but grabbed the opportunity to advertise it as the
special director's cut!
The most
recent (in fact, third) version of Orson Welles' masterpiece Touch of Evil (1958) now available
indicates the complex ways in which films are made and re-made – particularly
within the Hollywood system. By the time Welles was able to view a work print
near to the completion of this project, it had already been significantly
tampered with – certain scenes having been re-shot or added by another
director.
In a final
attempt to ensure some overall stylistic and narrative coherence, Welles penned
a long memo detailing suggestions for the editing and sound mixing of the film.
Twelve years after his death in 1985, this memo was used by a team of
reconstructors – headed by post-production guru Walter Murch – to arrive at a
speculative reconstitution of Touch of
Evil as Welles might have preferred to see (and hear) it.
In truth,
casual viewers of the new version (including some Welles fans) may be hard
pressed to detect many of these changes. Only the justly famous opening scene –
a long take that tracks cop Vargas (Charlton Heston) and his wife Susan (Janet
Leigh) across the Mexican-American border – is strikingly altered, no longer
having to compete with credits and Henry Mancini's score.
For those
who know the film well, however, there can be no disputing the significance of
the work done by Murch and his collaborators (including foremost Welles
scholar, Jonathan Rosenbaum). Touch of
Evil is now tighter, crisper, more of a piece. Into the bargain, the image
quality has itself been cleaned up and enhanced – making the movie a more
dazzling and baroque vortex than ever. (Arguments still rage, however, about
the film’s correct aspect ratio.)
Touch of Evil hails from a lost era when nominal
whodunits by directors such as Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger always held more
in reserve than the simple answer to a plot enigma. This furiously complicated
narrative – tracing the struggle between Vargas and his shady nemsis, Quinlan
(Welles), over the identity of a murderer – has as its real, profound subject
the moral problems of guilt and punishment, appearance and truth, means and ends.
But it is
perhaps too easy to give the film a high-and-mighty Shakespearean aura, while
downplaying what makes it so immediate, visceral and enjoyable. Touch of Evil is a B movie in every
sense, fully exploiting the outrageous, scandalous trashiness of its seedy
places, events and characters.
A key,
unforgettable sequence where Susan is menaced by delinquents in a motel room –
with its creepy intimations of violence, drug abuse and sexual violation –
clearly foreshadows Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and the entire career of David Lynch.
Touch of Evil is sometimes hailed as the last,
magnificent gasp of the classic film noir era. To the standard, generic elements – cops and crime, dark streets, bars and
bordellos – Welles adds his own intricate patterns. At every moment the story
configures a triple transgression, superimposing bodily, ideological and
geographical confusions.
That famous
opening shot is not merely a show-off demonstration of visual style and
narrative economy. It is an emblem of the way in which Welles expresses his
knotty themes in a brilliant choreography of movement, space and action. The
chief virtue of this new – and definitely improved – Touch of Evil is that it compels us to appreciate Welles' greatness
all over again.
MORE Welles: The Lady from Shanghai, F for Fake, Citizen Kane © Adrian
Martin May 1999
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