BFI Film Classics – books commissioned by the British Film Institute, published by Bloomsbury in the United States -- make a welcome return with Richard Deming’s excellent study of A Touch of Evil. Orson Welles’s 1958 noir is justly celebrated by film aficionados, though its meandering plot has puzzled many viewers. Deming's book is a fine guide for the perplexed.
Set in a town near the US-Mexican border, the movie fuses sex and violence in a boiling cauldron. It begins with an explosion that interrupts an embrace and ends with two shooting deaths in an oilfield.
As Deming points out, one remarkable thing about the film is the extent to which the plot is subordinate to the technique. Welles uses cinematic means to explore questions of justice, motivation and “a complex, perpetually equivocating moral world,” in the author's phrase. If the causality and chronology of events are enshrouded in a swamp-like fog, it’s because Welles achieves his effects by cinematic rather than literary means. Deming’s analysis of the famous tracking shot that opens the movie is right on the money.
Deming strikes a personal note in his preface by way of ushering us into the darkness of Welles’s vision. In chapter one he presents a valuable summary of noir, its meaning, its history. He argues that A Touch of Evil “is more than the apotheosis or apex of a genre or a style” – to his mind, it is the ultimate noir, and then some. The movie’s central thesis, he argues, is spoken by Charlton Heston, playing the Mexican policeman Vargas, to Welles, playing the corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan, an obese bully, a bigot, and a slob: “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”
Janet Leigh, the blond Yankee spouse of the Mexican Vargas, is as beautiful and vulnerable as in Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate, and Marlene Dietrich as a fortune teller may have the best line in the movie. When Welles asks her to read his future, she has, “You haven't got any.” “Huh?'” “Your future's all used up.”
A Touch of Evil takes the romance out of noir, and leaves only the criminality, the hostility, the spite, and the evil that men do that lives after them. It is a deliberately ugly movie, refusing to treat sin and crime, the stuff of noir, with the romantic sheen and sensual promise that usually comes with the turf. (Think of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past.) Welles, possessor of a “distinctive smoothly textured baritone with its ability to slide across tonalities with both insolence and nobility,” is willing to sacrifice even this most valuable of assets; he slurs his words, mumbles, steps on other characters’ lines.
“Who’s the boss – the cop or the law?” Vargas asks. That’s the thematic crux of A Touch of Evil. the movie. But the experience of the movie is far more unsettling than any such formulation, and Richard Deming's discussion of the film makes it an object lesson in understanding the meaning of a narrative in cinematic images rather than in literary terms.
The BFI has seized the opportunity to reissue of other books on the backlist. I enjoyed Greil Marcus’s take on The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer), for example. Marcus, who writes with swagger and is never less than interesting, regards the picture as the “most exciting movie” from Citizen Kane to The Godfather, an overstatement but an arresting one.
The Manchurian Candidate is Frankheimer's best movie To make his point about the originality and brilliance of the brainwashing sequence that opens the movie, Marcus argues that by comparison the Hitchcock / Dali dream collaboration in Spellbound is “visually florid and intellectually dead.” I maintain that Spellbound, Hitch’s most Freudian effort, is underrated, but perhaps the larger point is that Gregory Peck's dream in Spellbound has a very different function from the collective hypnosis of the American POWs in The Manchurian Candidate. To exalt the latter it is not necessary to deprecate the former. Criticism is not a zero sum game.
Again, to substantiate his feeling that Sinatra’s performance in The Manchurian Candidate is the best in his Hollywood career, with which I would concur, Marcus says that Sinatra in From Here to Eternity gave "a one-note performance" and that Ernest Borgnine's in the same film was "better." Come on.
Agree or disagree, Marcus is a compelling writer, and he hits the nail on the head when he talks of “the Iron Maiden of repression,” which sums up Laurence Harvey's acting in The Manchurian Candidate -- and explains why Al Pacino’s work in The Godfather movies was the best of his career.
Other books in the BFI series include Camille Paglia’s characteristically provocative and engrossing study of The Birds. Paglia contends that Tippi Hedren is “the ultimate Hitchcock heroine” (not a consensus view) and analyzes her, what she says, what she wears, with the meticulousness of an exceptionally astute apostle of Freud. It is always stimulating to spend a few hours listening to Camille Paglia, though I do wish she would overcome her aversion to Doris Day, among the best of all the big band singers, and Deborah Reynolds, whose contributions to Singing in the Rain and The Tender Trap are not to be underrated.
-- DL
