Review: Orson Welles’s Classic Noir Touch of Evil on Kino Lorber 4K UHD

Paul Schrader once dubbed Orson Welles’s 1958 classic Touch of Evil as “film noir’s epitaph.” The film came late in the development of a genre that had started in the early 1940s, at a point where its component themes and stylistic quirks had become commonplace enough to warrant explicit commentary, even parody. On the other hand, the Janus-faced Touch of Evil points the way ahead for burgeoning movements like the French New Wave that would take much from Welles’s penchant for location shooting, handheld camerawork, and tinkering with genre tropes. So, in fact, Touch of Evil occupies a truly liminal space in film history. Not for nothing was one of its working titles Borderline.

This sense of liminality extends throughout Touch of Evil. Most obvious is the fact that it takes place in Los Robles, a border town between the U.S. and Mexico. At first, the film establishes a series of juxtapositions along this divide: between the haves and the have nots, law and lawlessness, cleanliness and filth, to say nothing about the racial divide.

But, then, the story proceeds to blur the line between these divisions. To this end, Welles reverses the makeup of the central mixed-race couple from the source material to feature a Mexican husband, Ramon Miguel “Mike” Vargas (Charlton Heston), and his American wife, Susan (Janet Leigh). Heston is, of course, the lantern-jawed hero, pitted against blatantly racist Captain Hank Quinlan (Welles), an almost Falstaffian figure of evil intent.

Touch of Evil is nothing if not timely, with its excoriation of police brutality, examination of systemic racism, and talk of open borders. Welles wasn’t above putting the theme right into his characters’ mouths, as when Vargas attests that “the policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.” What’s most interesting about Vargas’s words is that they will eventually come back to haunt him. When Susan is abducted and subjected to what he’s led to believe are unspeakable things, Vargas takes the law into his own hands. “I’m a husband now, not a cop,” he avers while demolishing a strip joint and beating several gang members into submission.

Further blurring boundaries, Welles brings Vargas and Quinlan ever closer to one another on the moral spectrum. Beyond the sheer charisma of Welles’s portrayal, Quinlan is humanized by several plot points, one about his wife’s murder, the other expressing his utter lack of monetary motivation. (He leaves that to the really corrupt politicos.) In addition to the aforementioned act of vigilantism, Vargas maneuvers Quinlan’s right-hand man, Sgt. Menzies (Joseph Calleia), into betraying his idol, using a method that Vargas himself despises: a wiretap. “Spying, creeping,” he mutters in disgust. The very act sees him up to his armpits in fetid water, runoff from the oil derricks that loom over the action, “pumping money” as Quinlan puts it, and standing in for the really rich who remain untouched.

The film’s final moments are among its most ambiguous. After their 11th-hour reunion, Mike and Susan tool off into the night, and we’re left with bordello proprietress Tana (Marlene Dietrich) and Assistant District Attorney Al Schwartz (Mort Mills) pondering the fall of Hank Quinlan. Schwartz delivers some seemingly offhand lines about Touch of Evil’s central mystery, the murder of Rudy Linnekar and his stripper girlfriend. Turns out Quinlan didn’t need to frame his suspect, as was his wont, because the man ultimately confesses. But we know that Menzies was told by Quinlan at one point to break the man, a clear order to beat the confession out of him. So how sure are we that the man was actually guilty?

Do guilt or innocence even matter in the film’s morally compromised world? Acting like some sort of Shakespearean emissary, Tana steps in to deliver the final decree: “He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?” Judgment is ultimately futile because human beings are complicated, and there’s some mystery that abides with them, some inexplicable quantum that keeps us from every really knowing each other. As Wittgenstein would have it, what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence. All that’s left—for Touch of Evil, and for classic noir in general—is to ring down the curtain, which Tana does with her curt “Adios.” Then the darkness takes over the screen.

Image/Sound

Each of the film’s three cuts gets its own disc, thereby really maximizing those bitrates. The transfers are uniformly outstanding, with greatly improved depth and clarity over Universal’s 2014 Blu-ray release. Russell Metty’s cinematography comes across stunningly, especially the plethora of night-for-night scenes. Each cut boasts a clean and clear Master Audio mono track that’s particularly impressive in the sonically dense cat-and-mouse sequence that concludes the film. All three tracks keep Henry Mancini’s lush score front and center.

Extras

The main draw here are a whopping five commentary tracks spread across the various cuts: three archival tracks that were available on the earlier Blu-ray release—from critic F. X. Feeney, Orson Welles scholars Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore, and Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh (moderated by reconstruction producer Rick Schmidlin)—and two that are brand new to this edition from critics Tim Lucas and Imogen Sara Smith. What’s truly impressive is that, with the exception of covering the hard facts of production history, there’s relatively little overlap here. Each track emphasizes different aspects of the film, or provides a suitably idiosyncratic reading of its themes and visual motifs, enough to make them all more than worthwhile. In addition, two archival featurettes delve into the film’s production and legacy with some interesting updates on the shooting locations.

Overall

Classic film noir’s epitome and epitaph, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil gets a stunning new UHD upgrade from Kino Lorber.