(1958)

Starring Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, Ray Collins, Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mercedes McCambridge, Joseph Cotton (uncredited cameo); dir: Orson Welles

There aren’t too many films that get born again, especially A.D., but Touch of Evil has long had a chequered history. The posthumous ‘director’s cut’ released in 1998 is, rightly, lauded (plot exposition in particular is optimized) but it has always been a sensational flick and in the wake of ’98 it’s timely to revisit a studio cut of Touch of Evil.

I say ‘a’ studio cut because there’d been more than one by the mid 1970s. Often described as a ‘butchered’ film, Universal followed its 108 minute preview version with a 95" release print, burying it at the bottom of a double bill with Diana Dors’ The Unholy Wife (remember this? – no, me neither).

Then as its reputation grew (Godard and Truffaut ensured the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels named it Best Film – elsewhere it sank without bubbles) through the 1960s, the 70s reissue of the longer preview cut enabled late-night movie hounds (like me!) to enjoy a long version – and also paid penance for past wrongs.

But enough history – Touch of Evil has always lived and breathed with its own dark, maudit, distorted heartbeat. It’s pure pulp – great, sleazy fun but also high art, and one of the greatest illustrations of how a thriller can shed light on the human condition.

Its visual extremism – impossibly long shadows, claustro compositions and absurdly tilted frames – engendered a critical consensus which said that by pushing the conventions of film noir to breaking point, Touch of Evil blew apart the genre for all time. It’s a view which makes the climactic explosion which punctuates the bravura opening tracking/crane shot virtually a paradigm of the entire undertaking. This is an attractive theory which currently seems to have been snuffed out by the illustrious ’98 re-edit; perhaps the work is now seen as such an artistic peak that we no longer wish to associate it with the punk energy of a subversive.

But we shouldn’t automatically write off the earlier, pre-’98 versions. In these days of musical sampling and remixes, two or more noticeably different edits can co-exist side by side, no problem. In fact I’m going to risk being labelled a heretic here because despite being blown away by the 1998 ‘director’s cut’ – a truly awesome cinematic feast – I find I still enjoy the meddled-with ‘studio’ version.

If there is any debate, the symbolic battleground around which it swirls is the legendary opening shot. Suffice to say, after seeing it ‘purified’, stripped of music and credits in ’98, going back to the trad. delivery you can’t help being impressed by how cool the meddling was. The sharp-looking graphics are edited in with an on-the-beat precision which augments and enhances the beautiful rhythm of the shot. And Mancini’s music is just totally boss! Cool slinky jazz as sleazily mulato as the scenario itself. So it’s an embarrassment of riches – two great cuts!

Revisiting Touch of Evil, inevitably some of the plot twists and drama recede into the background through their familiarity, but this allows the humor to come to the fore. It’s embarrassingly funny – Tamiroff especially hamming his rug-slipping gang boss role remorselessly to side-splitting effect. He even tops Orson’s sly glee in the oily fat man stakes. Sydney Greenstreet’s Caspar Gutman was permanently eclipsed by these two guys!

Such laffs of course only serve to deepen the tragic impact of Welles’ character, Hank Quinlan, whose ‘ends-first/means-second’ efficiency trips up in the ‘civilised’ world of due process, with inevitable results. (Sure, there’s a whiff of Orson’s own backstory here but this is best left as an undertone, where it provides additional, useful, shading.)

The truth of Welles’ observation that he didn’t make Quinlan a hero is the fact that although the suspect whom Quinlan stitches up confesses his actual guilt late in the piece, the narrative presents this in an offhand manner. Vindication is not the point here.

Of all the film’s numerous dualisms – gringo American ‘superiority’/Third World desperation; Spanish-speaking solidarity/shifting Yankee loyalties; sexual licence/frigidity; outward success/inward failure – it’s the public/private life dichotomy that is most effective. This is the crux of the film. The more Chuck Heston’s Vargas chooses (this is vital) to pursue his professional responsibilities over his newlywed wife’s needs, the more we see her becoming endangered.

Welles’ spatial deployment of this contrast is masterly, often placing Mr and Mrs V. geographically cheek-by-jowl yet totally oblivious to each others’ presence and whereabouts. This grows, from the opening sequences where Janet Leigh is lured into a meeting with Tamiroff, but is most vividly shown late in the film where, waking in a drugged and semi-naked haze to find the murdered gang boss staring down at her in bug-eyed rigor mortis, she screams from the balcony of the cheap hotel room to the street scene below, as her hubby drives right on by unawares.

In fact the coordination of the film’s movement is nothing short of choreography, with a relentless yet elegant dynamism to all the outdoor scenes. Nothing is ever static, just like the shifting landscape of the story and the characters’ alliances and fates.

The real mystery of Touch of Evil is Charlton Heston. In his starchy uptightness and concern for procedure, his Vargas can’t compete with the corpulent bullfrog of a Hank Quinlan who wears the cost of his cynical worldliness in every candy bar-bloated and whisky-marinated crevice and fold. Stories from Ben-Hur of Chuck’s obliviousness to that movie’s sly homo-erotic subtext suggest his blankness here is genuine. Yet it was also his star power insistence which led directly to Orson directing this, his first Hollywood production in a decade. Of course it was also Orson’s last ever Hollywood production. Today it seems almost as good as his first.

• Roger Westcombe