Touch of Evil

Richard Deming

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781844579495
• eBook ISBN: 9781844579518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Orson Welles' classic 1958 noir movie Touch of Evil, the story of a corrupt police chief in a small town on the Mexican-American border, starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, is widely recognised as one of the greatest noir films of Classical Hollywood cinema. Richard Deming's study of the film considers it as an outstanding example of the noir genre and explores its complex relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson. He traces the film's production history, and provides an insightful close analysis of its key scenes, including its famous opening sequence, a single take in which the camera follows a booby-trapped car on its journey through city streets and across the border.

1 Noir’s Epitaph

In the totality of art there is a contemplative vein and an expressionist vein.

—André Bazin

In a short essay from 1972 published originally in Film Comment that has become a seminal piece of criticism on film noir, the well-known writer/director Paul Schrader, most famous perhaps for having written the screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) referred to Welles’s 1958 film Touch of Evil as ‘film noir’s epitaph’.¹ With fitting rhetorical flourish, Schrader characterizes Welles’s film this way because it serves, he argues, as the movie that is the culmination of the noir era. The noir era is usually presented as having begun in the early 1940s, with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) being the film that generally established the standard for what would come to constitute the look and feel of noir. Schrader calls Kiss Me Deadly, produced in 1955, just three years prior to the appearance of Touch of Evil, film noir’s masterpiece. For him, noir, as it developed throughout the 1940s and 1950s, was less of an actual genre and more like a style or a loose set of characteristics and themes that showed some affinities among a variety of films made over a particular period of time. The looseness of these correlations makes a stable definition of film noir therefore nearly impossible.

The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), © Warner Bros.; Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), © Parklane Pictures.

Part of the reason that noir is hard to define is because the critical understanding of it came late in the genre’s development. The label, coined by French critics, was meant to codify certain tendencies in American cinema that they were able to observe from their European perspective. It had been hard to see many American films in France during the Second World War, and so when they did at last have access, French audiences saw a large number of these films grouped more tightly together because they were distributed in a much smaller timeframe, thereby allowing them to discern stylistic and thematic associations and shared resonances across different movies that had hitherto gone unremarked.

It was not until 1955 that the term truly establishes its critical ground in the book-length study Panorama du film noir americain, written by French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton.² Borde and Chaumeton helped pull together the nascent discussions of the body of films that constituted the style, and their analysis provided a structure for thinking about these films.³ Critical interest in investigating noir’s parameters would grow throughout the 1960s and 1970s and the phrase itself would become one of the most broadly familiar of cinematic terms. This means that most ‘noir’ films have been retrofitted with that descriptor. Nevertheless, Schrader offers a few characteristics by which a category might hold together. Some are quite broad: he notes, for instance, the fact that film noir scenes are usually shot to appear as if the action is occurring at night. Also, water – in the form of rain, rivers, surf and so forth – is a prevalent trope and recurring image in film noir. Other characteristics are more usefully specific: he points out that often within any given frame of film noir, there is a compositional tension that underscores any tension occurring in the characters’ actions, so that shots are often as expressive of the narrative content as anything being said by the people on screen. In literary terms, we would say that the form is an extension of the content. The camera angles become twisted and oblique, thereby disrupting clean, horizontal lines. The dizzying mise en abyme of the climactic mirror sequence of Welles’s other noir, The Lady from Shanghai (1947) perhaps best epitomizes that visual tension. The visual component makes manifest an often complex, even vertiginous narrative flow, which adds to the general moral ambiguity of characters’ actions and motivations. And, Schrader adds, the context for the narrative often occurs at the edges of society, where crime and law, order and disorder, blur together.

Arguably noir’s ‘golden era’ came to an end, or was at least no longer tenable, when the shades and shadows of black and white film stock were displaced by audience’s preferences for the dynamism of Technicolor and as the United States moved through a jingoistic phase brought about by rampant McCarthyism and then passed into the binaries of Cold War ideologies. With more and more American moviegoers relocating (some would say fleeing) into the suburbs, movie audiences, hopeful about a growing economy and buoyed by the perception of American political and military prominence, generally became more circumspect about the urban moral ambiguities represented in such films as Double Indemnity (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and On Dangerous Ground (1951). This optimism would not last, as civil strife grew throughout the 1960s and such large-scale historical events as the Vietnam War and the respective assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X produced a pronounced disillusionment that coloured American consciousness. In the wake of both tremendous social upheaval and personal malaise, film noir, like some dark phoenix, arose again out of the ashes of urban riots and Watergate. Paradoxically, cinema would be renewed by both a maverick independent spirit of the New American Cinema, pioneered by outsiders of the major studios as well as with the emergence of neo-noir in the 1970s, with the return to this film form reflecting an increasingly prevalent cynicism towards politics and the morality of authority figures.

The Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), © Columbia Pictures Corporation.

Neo-noir covers a range of films from the 1970s to the present, from Mean Streets (1973) and Chinatown (1974) to Blade Runner (1982), Jackie Brown (1997), Training Day (2001) and even the television series Breaking Bad (2008–2013). What neo-noir brought back into aesthetic and cultural relevance was the feeling that all moral and just possibilities have been exhausted, and the focus of neo-noir remains on protagonists that have no delusions that any social or political system can be changed.

The difference between the two versions of noir may be ultimately just a matter of degrees. With classic film noir, the endings could be downbeat, but redemption felt somehow possible even if never achieved. Any victories were pyrrhic, but still there were victories. Sam Spade does send Brigid O’Shaughnessy to the police, for example, and the Kid at the end of Out of the Past (1947) covers for his late friend Jeff and lets Ann keep a bittersweet story that allows her to live her life without grieving. These are not happy endings, by any means, but the outlook these movies share is not necessarily born wholly out of despair. With neo-noir, however, it rarely seems like there is any room for faith in anything. In a line that best sums up neo-noir, Gene Hackman’s character in Night Moves (1975), Harry Moseby, a private detective, responds when asked which team is winning the football game that he is watching, ‘no one wins. One side just loses more slowly.’ Idealism dies many deaths in these films.

This digression into the afterlife of noir is to suggest that it is possible to think of Welles’s Touch of Evil as not the epitaph of noir but the precursor of neo-noir: it signalled a new beginning, an evolution, rather than an end. Or perhaps it shows us noir is simply, inescapably, always noir, and that its era never did end.⁴ Schrader’s labelling Touch of Evil as noir’s epitaph is seductive in part because it provides a definitive final edge to the era and in part simply because as a statement it sounds usefully authoritative. Indeed, it seems one can barely mention Touch of Evil without someone citing Schrader’s line. Yet, the label limits how we might see Welles’s film largely because it buries it in a genre by claiming that it memorializes it. Had Welles been more orthodox in his use of the style, hewing more closely to a rough realism than the baroque expressionism that shapes so much of the film’s style (a tendency consistent with Welles’s entire body of work) Schrader’s description might be useful, but in reality Welles had little interest in commenting on the genre at all.⁵ In other words, Schrader’s statement reveals more about noir as a critical term than about Touch of Evil itself.

Referring to Touch of Evil as noir is no moot claim, though. Certainly the film has its roots in that mode, which by 1958 had lost its prominent position in the nightly offerings of movie houses and theatres across the country. What I want to add, however, is that thinking of it only or even primarily in terms of noir’s generic conventions masks the film’s greater ambitions and keeps critical focus on where the film came from, rather than investigating where it wants to go. Such focus risks missing the larger claims Touch of Evil makes about the complexities of morality. If Welles was forced to begin with genre, given the nature of the material with which he was working as well as his desire to court a wider audience, he did not want to stay in its orbit. Arguably, Welles exploits the genre’s overfamiliarity, employs its clichés as clichés, even as a sense of existential exhaustion permeates his film. The structure of noir allowed him to lean on the foundation of a genre while also allowing him to work with certain more avant-garde techniques that had been showing up in his films since The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), if not even Citizen Kane (1941). In some ways, too, as we will see in the next chapter, Touch of Evil owes at least as much to German expressionism, in terms of its formal dimensions, as it does to noir. The film, in regards to its themes as well as its exploration of taboo subjects and ugliness or brutality, also serves as a precursor for the exploitation cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s that smuggled in social commentary amidst its prurient images and storylines. Even Welles’s practice in Touch of Evil of blending together A-list stars with a bevy of character actors and once-famous performers from previous decades (Marlene Dietrich or Joseph Calleia, for instance, or Welles himself) points forward towards Quentin Tarantino’s tendency to pluck veteran actors from obscurity and use the fact of their history as a tonal element of the film’s texture. In this light, Welles becomes one of cinema’s first postmodernists in his conscious use of an exhausted mode to comment on exhaustion and to interrogate the limitations of genre and categories for determining how we interpret action.

While social, environmental, and cultural developments of the 1950s and early 1960s are undoubtedly factors for noir’s decline, just as such forces had contributed to its popularity in the first place, one cannot rule out the sheer aesthetic exhaustion that creeps in whenever the conventions and formulas of a style or genre become so familiar that the audience experiences conventions as only clichés, rather than as the particular details of story, character or cinematic form. As Janet Leigh’s character, Susan, says to the villainous Grandi to fend off his bullying tactics when they are first introduced, ‘You know what’s wrong with you, Mr. Grandi? You’ve been seeing too many gangster movies.’ Her comment offers an ironic, self-reflexive cue to the audience, letting them know Welles would be identifying and activating their expectations in order to reframe the familiar. When predictable tropes and conventions overwhelm the specifics of content, an audience sees not only the movie they are watching but seemingly every other version and iteration of that kind of movie they have ever seen, superimposed all at once. New tactics are crucial and necessary or the genre is simply done for.

Welles’s film is more than the apotheosis or apex of a genre or style, however. If making a case for a stable category by which we can always identify a movie as being or not being noir is impossible, then Welles’s Touch of Evil deserves attention to its specific elements outside of genre considerations. Noir is the ladder, so to speak, that Welles uses to get viewers to climb to the place he wants them – once they reach it, the ladder is thrown away. Welles strives to have the viewers of Touch of Evil invest themselves in a dark sketch of the complexities of moral action and the limitations of our abilities to make choices free from ethical ramifications and consequences. In the film, the wrong people are right and the right people are wrong; every action is fraught with compromise. The thesis of the film can be located in something Vargas says to Quinlan, ‘A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.’ No one has it easy in Touch of Evil, despite the corners Quinlan tries to cut.⁶ Derek Malcolm, writing for The Guardian about the film when the restored version appeared in 1999, observes, ‘Plenty of films may have made this point. But Touch Of Evil […] expresses it both more strongly and more delicately than most, because he lets us see both sides of the equation.’⁷

Touch of Evil, aside from any gestures it makes to the conventions of noir, also foregrounds what had ever been an abiding central focus of Welles’s work: the transition from one era to the next and a central figure of power or authority that fights that change with a cruel kind of violence, whether emotionally, physically or politically. Hank Quinlan, the main antagonist in Touch of Evil, employs all three of these tactics, sometimes all at once. It is perhaps the film’s focus on forms of cruelty that pass for moral action that places it beyond the constraints of thinking of it merely as a genre film, and is what makes it a classic of modern cinema.

Beginnings

The original script did in fact arise from a relatively successful conventional pulp novel published by Whit Masterson in 1956 titled Badge of Evil. ‘Masterson’ was the nom de plume used by the team of Robert Wade and Bill Miller, and together these two wrote more than thirty novels over their career, including the source text for what would become the 1964 Ann-Margret vehicle, Kitten with a Whip. It would be inaccurate to say Welles was ‘inspired’ by the novel, even if that text provided the original source material. In essence, the novel is what Welles used as an underlying suggestion or catalyst, but he felt no need to be particularly faithful to that source. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface: Touching Back on Touch of Evil
• 1 Noir’s Epitaph
• 2 Filming Evil
• 3 ‘What You Say About People’
• 4 Losing Touch
• Notes
• Credits
• Bibliography and Additional Reading
• Imprint