Orson Welles’ brilliant Touch of Evil opens with a dazzling piece of eye candy: one long, fluid shot of a car planted with a bomb travelling through city streets, exploding just as it moves off camera. The shot is technically brilliant, and introduces the film’s great theme: evil is all around us, lurking silently, waiting to explode without notice.
The plot revolves around the investigation of the bombing, and dirty secrets that are aired in towns on each side of the U.S.-Mexican border. Welles plays a dissolute, but once great police chief of a Texas town. In a bizarre, studio-enforced decision, Charlton Heston plays a ‘Dudley Do Right’ Mexican lawman. Heston never seems comfortable, looking more like a guy with a bad tan than a Latino cop.
Touch of Evil is more than a crime drama; it also plays with our preconceptions and prejudices. There’s the interracial marriage of Heston and the lovely Janet Leigh, and the characterization of the Texan cop as evil, and the Mexican as good. As Shakespeare said, "Nothing is but what is not." Just when you think you have things figured out… well, this is a film noir to end all film noir, and you can’t have a mystery without a few plot twists.
Some scenes are among the best Welles ever shot: a single light bulb flapping around in an ocean of darkness, building tension with each pendulum swing; the now much imitated spider web window shadows that fill a seedy Mexico hotel room; and a classic finale, with Heston in hot pursuit of Welles through muck and mire.
Look for great cameos by Dennis Weaver as a neurotic desk clerk, and Marlene Dietrich as a madame who knew the police chief in his better days.
If this is not his greatest film, Touch of Evil certainly is among Welles’ most entertaining.
