People watch films and television shows for different reasons, looking for various hooks. I am usually about sorting out the flow of events, choices and circumstances, how do we live and come through the accidents, where do we find ourselves at any given time, what do we think about it and what do we do about it, the impact of decisions and the role of pride and blindness, and the hints and nudges each one of us experiences in the midst of all of that, to see, not just life, but Life.
So I’ll go for almost any genre, if you’re grappling with those things.
My first grown-up reading was the mystery (Rex Stout was my favorite), and even though every good story is, at heart, a mystery (what will she do next?), the actual genre is probably still my favorite – particularly, as I’ve written here before, 20th century noir, both in print and on film.
So of course, I suppose it was time to watch one of the last real American noir films, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.
The trouble is, do you remember that bloviating first paragraph? Well, none of that applies here, really, except, I think, in a meta sense. It’s a hugely enjoyable movie, of course, but its origins and trajectory of production are from such a relatively shallow place and are such a mess that all of that character and Painful Epiphany stuff I’m always looking for, just isn’t part of the picture, and it’s not the point.
So, that is all to say that most of the time, when I write in this space about movies and shows, it’s with that framework in mind. Not going to happen here.
Touch of Evil isn’t an “Orson Welles picture” either in its beginning or its first ending. He didn’t write the first script and was suggested as the director by Charlton Heston, who’d already been cast. Most famously, control of the film was wrested from him post-production, so that the original release had been recut and scrambled by editors who did what the studio, not Welles wanted, and was a flop – a confusing flop.
So anyway, let’s talk about the movie.
Based on a novel, the movie is about corruption. Welles plays a deeply corrupt sheriff of a border town, and the action freely flows between the United States and Mexico – as life, in general and enviously, did back in 1958.
Welles is startling, immense, oozing, recognizable only by his voice. A local businessman has been killed in a car explosion – just on this side of the border, although we know, from the first seconds of the movie, that the bomb was planted on the Mexico side. Who did it? Or, more precisely, who can it be pinned on? And with this Mexican law enforcement fellow roaming around, taking an interest, perhaps it’s a good time for the local drug and other-bad-things gang to take care of him, discrediting him before he gets a chance to testify in the trial of the local jefe’s brother down in Mexico City?
And there you have it. That’s basically the plot, but the point of the thing is not the plot. It’s what Welles does with the camera and the framing and even with his own body and his voice that is mesmerizing, beginning with the iconic first scene, unmatched in both its tension as well as the subtle theme – lives are intertwining, right here and now, even thought they don’t know it, they have no idea.
It’s tangled, always-teetering-on confusion. The scenes shift back and forth between the United States and Mexico, between crime-trackers, who are really mostly crime-framers, and Janet Leigh being toyed with and used as a means to get at her (Mexican?) husband, Charlton Heston (!?). Zsa Zsa Gabor pops in as one of the strippers and of course there’s Marlene Dietrich, a madame, offering one of the best lines of the movie, to the Welles character, corrupt, fat and drunk, as tarot cards spill across the table.
Tell me my future.
You have no future.
No there’s no growth or self-revelation and what tension there is, in my view, is dissipated by the miscasting of both Heston and Leigh. Welles is so grounded, so right out of the earth, and Heston and Leigh are just…acting, in the worst of that 50’s manner. It’s not that Heston isn’t actually, you know, Mexican – in black-and-white, and hardly having to speak any Spanish and not affecting an accent, he can mostly pass. He’s just (in my view) a wooden actor. So that doesn’t help. The conflict is too convoluted, too many set-pieces are silly – the drug addicts surrounding Leigh, Dennis Weaver’s over-the-top weirdness – even though the line he repeats is memorable: I’m the night man!
So no, I couldn’t look for my usual threads in this one, but even so, 90% percent of the scenes are so visually stunning, the glimpse into cross-border life is intriguing, the hints of counter-culture to come are entertaining, and most of all, Welles’ performance – make it a completely satisfying movie, and one worth rewatching in a way that something more “cohesive” from beginning to end might not be.
It’s just one more lesson in the oddness and risk of the creative process. We have something in our brain, and we want, we work so hard, for our vision to be realized. But it can’t be. Because we are limited and weak and lacking in talent, because someone else gets their hand in it, because, yes, we must work with others, because actors die or get arrested, because our kids walk in the room or call just when the idea we thought was perfect was, indeed perfect, and poof…it’s gone? Or there’s no time? Or just not enough time? Or enough money?
That’s the way it is. That’s the story of art. Not a piece emanating directly from our spirit, perfectly realized – no, only one Creator gets that privilege- but rather a mess of a thing that isn’t what we intended, but has its own particular particularity anyway, and it just might be beautiful, and it must might make some sort of crazy sense.
Oh.
Come to think of it, perhaps I did get my experience of meaning-out-of-accidents anyway.
Maybe?
Charlotte was Both 