(This was supposed to accompany a review of the new DVD release, but Universal didn’t send me a copy. I wrote it after a theatrical screening a few weeks ago, and there’s no reason to let a few hours of writing go to waste.)

It’s either to Orson Welles’ credit or the result of a contrarian rebel yell when Citizen Kane is brushed aside as not being the director’s finest film. The Magnificent Ambersons is frequently cited as a worthy alternative, and sometimes the especially difficult like to throw in The Lady from Shanghai or, for the bravest of souls, Mr. Arkadin. But probably more popular for the anti-Kane contingent is Touch of Evil, Welles’ 1958 masterpiece that failed commercially and signaled the end of the director’s relationship with Hollywood. The film doesn’t reach the heights of Kane, but, in its own way, Touch of Evil is equally important and marvelous enough to serve as the ending point for the film noir movement. When the picture is frequently given that status of bookending true film noir, it’s an honour earned both for the achievement within the movie and as a logical conclusion that allows for no real continuance. There’s simply nowhere else to go after Touch of Evil. The so-called neonoir titles that would emerge in colour years later are more retreads than new building blocks, content with anointing Welles’ film as the creative end point of a style simply unable to realistically keep regenerating into exciting and authentic attempts at the corruption of the soul.

Not only is that very corruption at the rotten heart of film noir, it’s coursing through Touch of Evil in a degree as prevalent and unavoidable as in any major example from the movement. When you strip away all the beautiful camera work, some of the finest in any black and white film ever, and leave behind Welles’s scenery-chewing, what remains is a story interested in good versus evil, decency against corruption. Charlton Heston’s Mike Vargas, just married in Mexico to his American bride Janet Leigh, is, by all indications, a good policeman struggling to bring down a narcotics ring in Mexico. Though Heston’s performance sometimes gets denigrated, his Vargas is almost perfectly realised as the dark-skinned white knight amid the titular corrupting influence. Heston was nothing if not effective in hero roles, the only kind he seemed to know how to play, and the character he creates here is perfectly square-jawed throughout. Those critics of the performance seem to require a more fully-faceted character instead of someone only interested in doing good. Vargas’ sensibilities are downright idiotic at times, including leaving his new wife to fend for herself in an out of the way, deserted motel, but Heston’s supreme focus is hardly the problem. His characterisation bleeds moral rectitude just as it should.

The contrast is Welles’ Hank Quinlan, a grotesque and obese American lawman with personal demons long since having dug their way into his daily hell. Quinlan is called a great detective and a lousy cop and that’s dead right. He’s crooked, corrupt, and prone to planting evidence when necessary. Welles makes sure to keep Quinlan mostly in the right, though. He isn’t portrayed as simply framing innocent men. The sticks of dynamite Quinlan supplies a chief suspect of the opening murder are, in their own way, corroborating evidence to both the perpetrator’s and the lawman’s guilt. The dangers here are obvious, as are the opposing techniques to the difficulties Vargas faces in bringing down his drug ring. Had Vargas acted outside the law and secured evidence against the Grandy family, his wife wouldn’t be at risk. Yet, watch how little Welles cares about the Grandy gang or the exploding car that opens the film. The director can hardly be bothered to navigate the almost labyrinthine plot. Touch of Evil is a character study nearly hampered by the insistence on telling a story.

Where the film truly excels in terms of cinematic language reserved solely for the medium of moving pictures is Russell Metty’s camera and lighting. No matter how many times you’ve heard the praise or seen the evidence, Touch of Evil is a visual masterpiece. Nearly every shot is rendered perfectly, regardless of the contentious aspect ratio, and when the frames are allowed to move one after the other the result is an awe-inspiring shock to remember what it is movies are capable of achieving. The celebrated opening, three and a half minutes of pure cinematic bliss, lets the camera track through the U.S.-Mexico border as Mr. and Mrs. Vargas head north on foot at the same time a wealthy businessman and his stripper girlfriend cross over via car. The car will explode but no one really cares. Welles certainly doesn’t seem concerned. Categorising Touch of Evil as a mystery is like calling Hitchcock’s Notorious a spy thriller. The arches in plot are so far beside the point as to be nearly irrelevant. There are viewers who need a cause and effect, but hopefully there are just as many if not more who are content to soak in Welles’ film with the plot burning far off to the side.

Touch of Evil is a movie that requires no understanding of the English language in order to be entirely effective. Its dialogue was dubbed and almost always seems beside the point, apparently improvised to some extent by the actors prior to filming. Keep Henry Mancini’s jazzy score and study the shots and exteriors of the performances. Welles gives his Quinlan a devastating sense of destruction. His brief encounters with Marlene Dietrich’s character and the allusions to Quinlan’s murdered wife tell us enough about the character as to reduce much of the other details as superfluous. Like many of Welles’ other films, Quinlan as protagonist is mired in reckless defeat. No other American filmmaker was so apparently obsessed with failure and, additionally, able to portray it as purposefully as Welles. Look at Citizen Kane and try to reconcile the potential CFK unintentionally abandons as he destroys himself. The Ambersons similarly are unable to recognise their weaknesses and self-made misfortune prior to a tragic result. The Lady from Shanghai is one big cautionary tale about strength of character and the lure of temptation.

These same themes of not understanding one’s own limitations are recurrent in Welles’ films. His Shakespeare adaptations are, by necessity, battered with dread and personal mistakes. As has been pointed out repeatedly in writings on Welles’ own life, the man whose work was dominated by triumph giving way to ultimate failure had a prophetic insight into his career by way of these favoured themes. If you apply Quinlan as Touch of Evil’s main protagonist, the film follows that same path, placing the detective as a man of unusual brilliance unable to avoid self-destruction. Though Vargas is given the traditional hero role, Quinlan is far more interesting. The latter follows the Welles protagonist path of destroying self in the midst of outside success. Quinlan is a noted law enforcement official, regarded as equally renowned and accomplished. His capabilities are not questioned and his crew is full of yes men who only have to be told how high when asked to jump. He is a man full of power and, in turn, given great opportunity for its abuses.

From a combination of hubris and neglect, Quinlan’s downfall comes at the hands of one of his disciples. Though the character as written would seem totally devoid of sympathy or concern on the part of the viewer, Welles the actor, aided by an inherent interest in the portrayer, layers him tightly in broken dreams. Quinlan is not merely a corrupt cop. He’s a good lawman resorting to doing what he thinks the courts may not. He tells his betrayer that the many incidents where the men had jointly worked outside the rules were merely acts of abetting justice. The loss of his wife and comfort found in Dietrich’s character fill in a few of Quinlan’s motivational blanks, as do the prosthetic obesity and wellworn nature artificially given to Welles. The uninitiated may not realise Welles, only in his mid-forties during filming, physically created his character before the cameras rolled to match the psychological portrayal of what’s seen onscreen. The girth, fatigue, and overall nature of Quinlan lend themselves to him being a Lon Chaney-like figure who’s looking for acceptance.

Indeed, many scenes in Touch of Evil, particularly those involving Janet Leigh in a motel room just a few years prior to her checking into Psycho, feel like they’re straight from a horror film. Part of the appeal of film noir would seem to be in its simulation of that horror unease now made real by the lack of easily identified monsters. Noir exposes the monsters in us all, making for an even creepier ordeal and one catered towards suspense borne from a more likely scenario of wrong time, wrong place. The thing that Touch of Evil successfully conveys is the possibility of a living nightmare where the world is off its axis and our beacon, in this instance Vargas, must struggle to restore order amid chaos. Where Welles’ film deviates from traditional noir archetypes is in its lack of ambiguity. As mentioned earlier, good and evil are clearly defined and only the motives behind each are at issue. The fatalism sometimes seen in noir doesn’t really play itself out here either, but Welles seems to be working from a much more basic, yet no less pessimistic, ideal.

The director elevates noir into his preferred Shakespearean methods of storytelling. Supporting characters sometimes memorably perfect (Akim Tamiroff as follically-challenged Uncle Joe Grandy) or bizarrely out of place (motel night clerk Dennis Weaver in possibly the worst performance ever found in a great film) serve their purpose much as they would in a theatrical setting, which Touch of Evil, like most all of Welles’ films, tends to borrow from a great deal. It’s from this impossibly strange mixture of procedural, horror film and Shakespearean-type play that the movie converges into a one-of-a-kind mastering of nervous tension bundled up inside a character study. Welles sweats through the viewer’s discomfort until the very end.