David Hast: Scott, have you seen Touch of Evil?
Scott Vander Werf: I've seen Touch of Evil upwards of maybe 10 times, going back over 45 years, directed by Orson Welles, one of my favorite Orson Welles films.
DH: Oh, you've seen it a lot. I've seen it a few times. Yes, directed by Orson Welles. So right away, you know it's something special. Of course, Welles is most famous for the first film he directed in 1941, Citizen Kane, which changed movie history. And just like Citizen Kane, this movie was badly understood by the studio that produced it. It was Universal International. And then it was badly handled and mangled in editing and badly promoted. And just like Citizen Kane and his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, it ended up being a box office flop.And just like Citizen Kane, it's now considered a great movie.
SVW: Not only is it considered a great movie, but the opening shot is one of the greatest shots in the history of cinema.
DH: Yeah, that shot is iconic, right? Not just for what a great shot it is, but for its influence. You've seen The Player, haven't you?
SVW: Yes, I have.
DH: Yeah, remember how that starts, right? The Player is this, it stars Tim Robbins. It's a Robert Altman film, and it's about, you know, kind of intrigue and a murder mystery, or it's not a mystery really, but a murder that happens among Hollywood executives. But the opening shot is this long one take, right? A long tracking camera moving around following characters, no edits. And in it, these executives are actually even discussing the opening shot of Touch of Evil.
SVW: While they're paying homage to it.
DH: Right. And I got to say, it's become completely overdone in movies now. It's very easy to do now, right? With the kind of equipment we have now, it's easy to do long, unbroken takes. There's some great ones, other famous ones. Scorsese has done some wonderful ones. There's one in Goodfellas. There's this amazing one in a boxing scene in Raging Bull. But now lots and lots of directors just show off and do these long four-minute shots.
SVW: Or a film like Dunkirk, whichit seems to be one unedited shot from beginning to end. It's not, but it seems to be.
DH: Right. And sometimes it's done brilliantly. Like think about Birdman. Birdman has the illusion of being one unedited shot, but of course it's not. Do you want to describe it or should I describe it?
SVW: You should describe it.
DH: OK.So the opening shot of Touch of Evil begins with a close upof some dynamite with a clock, you know, an analog clock attached to it and somebodysetting this bomb. And then the camera pulls back and we see them go to a trunk of a car and the camera cranes way up high. And we see, you know, so now we're seeing a high angle wide shot of someone putting this bomb into the trunk of a car. Then people, a couple, get into the car, start driving and then over the period of about three and a half minutes, which is how long this shot is,it's done on a crane andit tracks through this entire border town. It's supposed to be the Mexican side of the border and then the American side of the border of a border town. It was actually shot in Venice, California. But it's shot on a locationat night. So it follows this couple and the couple in the car. Then a couple comes into it walking, who are the leads in the movie, Janet Leigh and Charl M. Heston.And it ends with them crossing the border into the United States. They kiss and then cut to the car exploding. There's a quick cut to the car exploding. Then a cut to the third shot of the movie after this like one-second-long shot of the car exploding. And that's another fairly long take done handheld of everyone running towards the explosion.
SVW: And then you find out that Charlton Heston is a Mexican cop and he's a dignitary from Mexico. His wife is an American played by Janet Leigh.And that's the beginning of the plot, which is intertwining a U.S. police officer detective played by Orson Welles. And then we meet the various characters that surround them. Also the people that are suspects.
DH: Right. the quick outline of the plot is simple. The actual plot itself, if you watch this movie for the first time, you're going to be confused that it's kind of complex and confusing. Don't worry about it. Just watch it for the incredible style of it.That's what really what makes it great. But yeah, it's just this bomb goes off. The bomb was planted on the Mexican side of the border where Charlton Heston would have some authority and it blows up in this little border town on the American side of the border where Orson Welles is this corrupt sheriff. And so then it just becomes first you think it's about tracking down who did the bomb, but then it turns out it also involves-- Charlton Heston's whole thing as he's trying to break this family of drug lordsand there's involvement on both sides and it becomes very intriguing. Charlton Heston is the, you know, he was really the power in this movie. Charlton Heston gets top billing. He was he had just done The 10 Commandments directed by Cecil B. DeMille so he was huge box office right as big as you can get in 1958 and universal went to him to cast him in the movie in the role.And so he really had the most clout in the movie and that's an interesting story he's a mistake in casting obviously would never cast an American actor to play a Mexican cop. So it kind of looks weird by today's standards. But Heston was, it was great because the story goes that they came to Heston and they said, will you do this movie? You you're going to be the lead. You're going to play this good cop. All we've got so far, we've got Orson Welles to play the sheriff. And Heston asked who was going to direct. And they said, well, we don't have a director yet. So Heston said, you got Orson Welles. Why don't you let him direct? You know, he's a pretty good director. So, he had enough clout that he made sure Wells got the job and when theyapparently almost fired him at one point, Heston said, he goes, I go. know, actors knew what a great director Welles was, even if studios were afraid his movie would bomb. And really, think Orson Welles steals the movie, don't you?
SVW: I do too, yeah. I think he steals the movie. before we get to, before I talk about him in terms of his acting, it's interesting what the story you just told.I'm picturing if some pedestrian journeyman director had gotten the oh job to direct the film, that it would have been this straightforward sort of whodunit detective film that it would have looked like any movie ever, you know, that ever madein the studio system in the late50s. And yet it becomes this baroque German expressionistic influenced film noir with just this incredible artistic feel to it.And it becomes both, it's Lebrinthian not just in the plot but also in the look of the film from beginning to end.
DH: Absolutely. And I think the answer to your question, don't think it's highly likely it would have just been an ordinary film because they also then gave it, Welles then rewrote the script. So he's the writer and director on it.
SVW: And you know what? In terms of rewriting the script,looking at the plot of the novel, it doesn't say anything about Mexico. So he made it the border town. He's the one that got a character like uh the Marlena Dietrich character into it. He's the one that made it what it is.
DH: Yeah. And what it is, I mean, how do critics and film scholars look at this movie?Sometimes people say it's the last true film noir, right? When people do this sort of, it's almost a cliche now, say, well, the film noir started with the Maltese Falcon in 1941. Of course you could pick a of movies but it clearly started in the early 40s and it ends they'll say it ends with touch of evil. That's not entirely true either there's a few more films in the late 50s into the early 60s you could say you're still really part of the film noir movement but what it does the best thing I read about this was Paul Schrader the very interesting wonderfulwriter and director who's from Grand Rapids, Michigan said that Touch of Evil is film noirs epitaph. It's like this movie, it's like Welles, it's like he looked at this movie and he said, I'm going to show the world everything, take film to water with logical conclusion. I'm going to do all the tropes and all the plot twists and the look of it and take them to extremes. And so yeah, the movie is just full of all these, you know, low angle shots, high contrast, wide angle shots of people's faces that are distorted.
SVW: And then just without giving any spoilers, how it concludes the final moments on the Mexican side of the border around all of this almost ruined architecture and manufacturing equipment. That scene is, like you said, it feels like film noir's epitaph.
DH: Yeah, it's like everything you can think of in film noir. He's just done in a way better than anyone else. But to such an extreme that the reason why I think he says it's the epitaph or that other people have said it's sort of the crowning glory of noir, is that he's done so much with the high contrast, low key look, and just the style of it,and the extremes of the plot and characterization, and I will add that they don't seem fake. It's just incredibly well done, right? But then after that, it's impossible to make a movie that's kind of with that style without kind of being self-aware of it. And so all the movies that follow after that we would call noir or even neo noir, they're kind of like meta movies, right? They're always there. They're the movie they are. But at the same time, if they get into that noir style, you're like, well, yeah, it's kind of self-conscious.
SVW: Now, after having seen this so many times and watching it again recently to be able to talk about it with you, the one thing that really struck me this time is how great Orson Welles is as an actor. He is the best actor in the film. He does not even seem like it's 19-- it's 1958, but it also could be 2026. He is such a natural.The way that he plays Hank is just brilliant. And it also stands out because all of the actors around him are these classically trained actors who are acting. And he doesn't even seem like he's acting. That's how brilliant he is in this movie.
DH: He is,and let's not forget,of course, Welles is a very important figure as a director. I mean, he directed Citizen Kane, but he actually did tons of acting, not just in his own movies, but in other people's movies. When the American Film Institute in the late 90s did their list of the 25 greatest, what they considered to the most important 25 actresses and 25 actors from the golden age of Hollywood, Welles was on that list. He did tons of great acting performances. And in this movie, mean, it’s one of his very best performances. I mean, he plays this. At the time, know, Orson Welles was a heavy man as he got older, but he actually wasn’t that obese at the time he made this movie, but he made himself look much worse. He made himself look heavier. He made himself look, he used makeup andprosthetics to give himself sagging jowls and deep eye bags and he's just like sweating and unshaven and he lives with his cane but uses it as a weapon. He's increasingly out of control with I was drinking and viciously violent and he's one of the most repellent movie characters ever and in some sense he was ahead of his time for just the graphicness of like a corrupt cop kind of character
SVW: and everything you just said is correct, but the way that he talks is so understated. Like he presents himself,even when he's responding to the characters around him, whether he's agreeing with them or disagreeing them, except for a few scenes where he raises his voice, he's always just cool as a cucumber.
DH: I mean, would just say he's a delight. It's a performance. It's a delight to watch. It's just such an interesting performance.
SVW: It starts with the first shot that you see him in as he pulls up in his car and the camera is down low and the door opens and he just this massive figure just comeslumbering out of the car.
DH: We haven't said anything about Janet Leigh. You know, Janet Leigh Lee, who was in one of the other uh episodes we did on the of violence when she was younger, when she was just like 21 in this movie, she's, I think she's still in her late 20s or something, but she's really good too.people have pointed out it's kind of interesting because she plays, there's this scene in like a deserted hotel where she's victimized and two years later, she's in Psycho. And the hotel manager in this movie is kind of like mentally deranged and it's almost like what was it about her, the roll of the dice that she ended up first doing this movie and then doing Psycho.
SVW: Now here's the thing, know, terms of being, looking at it from a critical perspective from today, she's fine in the film, and so is Charlton Heston, but when I first saw this movie 45 years ago, immediately I thought the two, the biggest flaw of this movie are those two characters. Not so much Janet Leigh, but mostly Charlton Heston. Because it's like, why is Moses playing this Mexican detective? You know, why is this white actor with the squarest of square jaws playing this Mexican detective. It just didn't fit. And they were, it was also the least interesting.Their parts in the movie were the least interesting things for me at that time, I should say. At the time, the first time that I saw it, maybe the next few times. I've grown to appreciate them now after seeing it and after, you know, becoming more seasoned as a film watcher.
DH: Yeah, I would disagree on Janet Leigh because her scenes are pretty edgy and interesting.
SVW: Except that she is just so naive and innocent. That's where I just thought, you know, whyare you crossing back over into the border? This is just shortly after the bomb goes off. Why are you following this obvious, looks like a juvenile delinquent right back over the border just because theguy says, oh, I've got a note for your husband.
DH: Yeah, I don't know. I think she's also kind of just interested in what is this intrigue that my husband as a law enforcement officer is involved in? She's naive and doesn't realize how dangerous it's going to be. But I think you're definitely right about Charlton Heston. But of course, isn't that true in a lot of crime type movies? The straight, you know, good cop is the less interesting character.
SVW: Well, and again, this is not the...In my recent viewing of this, I didn't really have the same reaction that I did 45 years ago. So he's grown...That part of the movie...is something that I accept now.I looked at it as a major flaw. It's not really a flaw. It's just like you say, if it's a flaw, it's sort of a flaw of the system at the time and how they make movies. Also talk about Marlena Dietrich.
DH: Yeah. Well said that the scenes with Marlena Dietrich were the best thing in the movie. And you could take all the Marlena Dietrich stuff out of the movie and it would still be the same movie. But I mean, it would still be, you wouldn't be losing any important plot points, but she's this, this character that he's known for years andhe seems to be in love with her, he being oh the corrupt sheriff. It's the only time you see an actually human side of him when he's with her. I think Wells wrote that when he was hired and then he got to write the script, he wrote in the scenes from Marlena Dietrich. They were old friends and he just thought she was such an interesting actress that she could... uh, add to it what do you think about the scenes?
SVW: Oh yeah, I think they're brilliant and in the fact that it's like this little sidebar to the whole movie thathe enters she's a she owns a saloon in a restaurant and known for her chili and it's on the Mexican side of the border and it's on when when he she first sees hi she doesn't recognize him because it is so apparently he would look completely different when he was young
DH: Yeah he's let himself go in a big way she says you got to eat fewer candy bars. But there's one of the great lines in the movie. She's obviously some sort of fortune teller, too, right? And she has these tarot cards and Wells says, he grabs the cards on the table and he's like, tell my fortune, you know? And she tells him, you know, I can't. Your future is all used up.
SVW: And yeah, and that's towards the end of the film and she's right.
DH: She's right, yeah. And she has the last line in the movie. Oh, one last thing about it, an interesting thing about it is this movie when it was released was 95 minutes long and there's an interesting story behind this, which is that they, um, Welles, you know, he'd had nothing but bad luck with American studios and this ended up being the last movie he ever directed for an American studio. He was done with Hollywood permanently after this movie. After them, he directed it, he assumed he had final cut, he supervised the edit, worked with the editor, had a finished final cut done. But before they released it, he left to go work on another movie in Mexico. Big mistake. It wasn't released yet. The studio showed it as a preview and then decided they didn't like it and they cut it in a big way. The theatrical release, if you look on IMDb, this movie is listed as 95 minutes long. I checked for streaming, both Amazon and Apple, which are both renting it, 95 minutes long. I think they're all showing the originaltheatrical release. But it turned out when Wells saw them butchering his film, before they released it, he sent a 58-page memo to Universal International givingvery clear detailed instructions for how to re-edit the movie so it would be right. Of course, they never did it. But in the late 90s,a producer discovered this. He got involved with Jonathan Rosenbaum, who was a great film critic who was a scholar of Welles and they got Walter Murch the great editor who you know was involved with Coppola and Lucas and people like that and Apocalypse Now and they just followed his instructions and so now if you find it, I mean maybe you can find it streaming somewhere, but certainly on DVD and Blu-ray and so forth you can find the 111 minute restored, according to Welles instructions version, which Janet Lee and Janet Lee and Charlton Heston were still alive in the late90s and they loved it and they said this is the movie Wells intended but even if you can't find it just watch the theatrical release.
SVW: Either either one is worth seeing.
DH: Yes absolutely. Thanks Scott.
SVW: Thank you.
