TOUCH OF EVIL: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Universal, 1958) Kino Lorber

The last act of Orson Welles’ life is a very strange, sad epitaph; reduced to peddling mid-grade plonk in commercial endorsements for Paul Masson’s winery, recording a prologue for the television series, Moonlighting, and becoming the frequent brunt of Johnny Carson’s glib monologues on The Tonight Show. Remember, Johnny once surmised it was so hot in L.A. he saw a pigeon taking refuge from the heat in the formidable girth of Welles’ shadow. But I digress. Welles not only observed as his reputation as the cinema’s enfant terrible eroded into something of a laughing stock, he also, to some extent, contributed to its downfall and malaise. In his prime, Welles had been a man of varying bombast, a perfectionist with a penchant for morose excesses in food, drink and late-night carousing.  He was bitter and self-loathing, a temperamental artist, arguably deprived of his first love – directing – but given the opportunity to perform before the cameras in projects of varying quality – the system exploiting his obvious talents to their own purposes. If only his movies had acquired a healthier respect, Welles might have risen through the ranks to become a legend in his own time. As it stands, he remains something of a legend untapped - a visual creator who gave us, arguably, the greatest movie of all time – Citizen Kane – before becoming a disappearing shadow of his former self.

Before this implosion, however, Welles was given one last opportunity to direct. Based on Robert Wade and William Miller’s Badge of Evil, Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) has long since acquired a reputation as a classic film noir. Before continuing, I suppose I should confess to not being a devotee of Touch of Evil in any of its various reincarnations. For me, the central flaw is not Welles’ cross to bear but rather in the hammy acting put forth by a heavily-pancake-makeup-ed and moustache-ed Charlton Heston (whom I otherwise revere) and Janet Leigh, who seems to be reading her lines from cue cards propped up just beyond camera range, but under the influence of some hallucinogenic to cloud her good sense and objectivity. No, it’s the fringe actors in Touch of Evil who hammer home the goods with class and restraint, like Joseph Calleia’s goony Police Sergeant Pete Menzies or Mercedes McCambridge’s unnamed gang leader with lesbian tendencies. And then, there is Marlene Dietrich – utterly superb as the fortune-telling madam with sad-eyed sly reflections on life. These are the saving grace notes that make Touch of Evil watchable in brief fits and sparks when Heston’s inadvertently jocular cop and his platinum-haired honey are not mopping up the screen with their overtly stylized actor’s pomposity. Oh, to have been a fly on these walls to learn how and why Welles accepted such out of touch performances in stark contrast to his own formidable and sustained brilliance as the thuggish and physically repulsive Police Capt. Hank Quinlan. Barely recognizable under his prosthetics, Welles’ central performance reveals a genuinely cynical, ugly and bigoted, corrupt cop who will stop at nothing to frame the innocent for crimes he has otherwise committed under a thin veil of self-aggrandizing determination to maintain his example of vigilante justice.

In its day, Welles rough cut of Touch of Evil was misperceived by executives at Universal Studios as little more than a gritty melodrama, unceremoniously dumped on the market as the bottom half of a double bill and all but ignored by audiences. Viewing the studio’s cut, it is easy to see why. In the editing process, conducted after Welles had already been removed from the project, Touch of Evil was ruthlessly butchered, given a boom-boom ‘catchy’ score by Henry Mancini (which Welles abhorred) and a linear narrative that, curiously, complicated the story rather than drawing out its clarity. Disgusted with their meddling, Welles rattled off a memo to Universal – an in-depth step-by-step critique with suggestions on how to improve the movie before its general release. Welles’ ideas were ignored. So, for decades, Touch of Evil remained a grand disappointment to Welles who, in the intervening decades, made several valiant attempts to convince Universal to reinstate his original vision and re-release the film. Sadly, it was not until after Welles’ death in 1985 that a more concerted effort came around to honor his wishes. But by then the damage seemed permanent. Universal had saved none of Welles’ outtakes, edits or trims; all of this extemporaneous material junked a long time ago. Miraculously, however, all was not lost.

There are two theories as to how Welles came to direct Touch of Evil. Co-star Charlton Heston has claimed after learning Welles would be in the movie, he insisted if Universal wanted him, they would have to agree to Orson as its director. There is some merit to Heston’s claim. By 1958, Heston’s reputation was clearly the more respected in Hollywood. His box office cache alone could easily have coaxed Universal into accepting these terms. There is, however, another tale to tell, one involving producer, Albert Zugsmith, a longtime admirer of Welles’ gifts and who, reportedly gave Welles a stack of scripts to consider. Orson’s wily genius accepted the challenge to make something unique out of the worst in the batch: Badge of Evil. In Touch of Evil, Welles is barely recognizable, buried under a mountain of prosthetics and body armor to portray the disreputable Capt. Quinlan, a once admirable cop, long since gone to seed. Drawing on a parallel between his character and Ramon Vargas – played by Heston as the forthright officer of the law – Welles’ performance in Touch of Evil remains both tragic and bone-chilling; a sort of self-effacing spiral into oblivion from which neither Quinlan’s reputation in the film, nor Welles’ own in Hollywood, survived. Viewing Touch of Evil today, one is immediately reminded of the caliber of Welles as a performer, utterly wasted long before his emeritus years with Welles – tragically – made the workhorse of someone else’s vision of his talents.

As originally intended, Welles opens Touch of Evil with a justly famous and fascinatingly complex three-and-a-half-minute dolly shot. A bomb is placed inside the convertible of an American couple driving through a Mexican border town (actually Venice Beach, Ca.). The car passes interracial newlyweds, Ramon Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) and his bride, Susan (Janet Leigh) before bursting into hellish flames. From here, the plot diverges into two parallel (and later, converging) narratives; the first involving Vargas, who is called to assist in the investigation, much to the discontent of Police Chief Captain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles). Quinlan’s bigotry and rage are directed at Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff); the head of a local Mexican crime syndicate. Quinlan’s right hand, Pete Menzies (Joe Calleia) is also a close friend who would do just about anything to ensure Quinlan’s one-time sterling reputation remains intact – even frame the innocent Manelo Sanchez (Victor Millan) for the crime of murder. But Vargas smells a rat. Furthermore, he is not onboard with Quinlan’s theories of the crime and decides to slowly explore the investigation from a different angle. Meanwhile, Susan has been left to her own accord at the remote Mirado Motel, run by its hapless and fearful manager (Dennis Weaver). Using Susan as leverage against Vargas, Uncle Joe sends a posse of delinquent youth, fronted by his nephew, Risto (Lalo Rios) and a lesbian cohort (Mercedes McCambridge) to the Mirado. In a rather shocking (then) and still very potent scene of implied gang rape, forced drug abuse and lesbianism, Susan is taken hostage to conceal the fact Grandi and Quinlan have been working together. She awakens from her stupor in a seedy bordello with Grandi’s corpse lying next to her, the latest victim in Quinlan’s cover-up. This being a noir thriller of a certain period and ilk, Quinlan is eventually found out by Vargas, who isolates and confronts him as per the charges; the whole conversation recorded for posterity by a hidden microphone.

Touch of Evil is an occasionally potent melodrama. Yet, at some level it fails to live up to Welles’ reputation as a cinematic genius. The story is compelling – in spots – and Russell Metty’s bold cinematography augments what is, in fact, a very pedestrian crime story with considerable visual panache. But somehow, Touch of Evil remains a fractured masterpiece – if ever a masterpiece, in fact, it was. There is more than one irony at play in the film For one, Heston’s star on its meteoric ascendance even as Welles’ own is exiting the stratosphere like a supernova. For another, the padded appearance of a slovenly Welles in makeup shockingly foreshadowing his own formidable girth in later years. Third, the film as a punctuation of the end of Welles’ Hollywood career on a decidedly sour and undistinguished note – the visionary reduced to making standard noir melodramas. Welles amassed an impressive roster of pop talent and veterans to appear in Touch of Evil; including Zsa Zsa Gabor as the madam of a border-city bordello and Joseph Cotten, playing a good-humored police officer. Undeniably, the outstanding cameo belongs to Marlene Dietrich as Tanya, Quinlan’s one-time lover who now runs a washed-up fortune-telling racket Quinlan frequents to remind him of his bygone youth. Realizing he is about to be caught by Vargas, Quinlan asks Tanya to tell him his future. “You haven’t got any,” she coldly replies, “Your future’s all used up.” Dietrich is at her careworn best in this scene, higher up the proverbial food chain than Welles’ Quinlan, as she cruelly deprives him of his last possible respite from the world before his incarceration. It is a masterful performance, the one-time vixen having quietly accepted the ever-evolving parade of youth and beauty has passed her by, unlike Quinlan, who is doomed to thirst after his former glory days.

Despite its boundary-pushing exploration of taboo subject matter, Welles’ rough cut of Touch of Evil failed to impress execs at Universal who found the narrative confusing. They opted to excise almost 25-minutes from his final cut, adding and re-shooting several key sequences in an attempt to draw clarity from the story. In response, Welles fired back a fifty-eight-page memo that detailed numerous ways to improve the picture while remaining faithful to his vision. Virtually all Welles’ ideas were ignored by the studio. Although Universal’s 98-min. cut did have its admirers in Europe, in America it was immediately dismissed and quietly forgotten. Then, in 1976, Universal discovered it had in its possession a 108 min. prevue version of Touch of Evil. Misrepresented as Welles’ definitive version (when, in actuality, the prevue included footage shot after Welles’ European departure), Universal re-released Touch of Evil theatrically and to good reviews. Then, in 1998, Touch of Evil was sent back to the editing room once more – this time under the supervision of Walter Murch, who used Welles’ original memo to Universal as his guideline. Since many of the damaging cuts made by Universal in 1958 no longer existed, this latest revision represents only an approximation of what Welles might have hoped. Nevertheless, it is this cut that best represents Touch of Evil as closely aligned to Orson's original intent. 

Kino Lorber has released Touch of Evil to 4K Blu-ray with results that are strangely similar to the Uni Collector’s edition. The overall image is a tad darker while offering minute refinements in overall clarity. But you really have to look to find the advantages here. What Kino has done is to isolate the 3 different versions of Touch of Evil on their own 4K UHD disc, perfectly to advance the bit rate to its maximum, while spreading out extras already included in Uni’s own deluxe standard Blu-ray release from 2011. To recap: Touch of Evil was released as a Collector’s Edition by Universal in 2009 – disappointingly without any extras and minus all but the 1998 version of the film. Universal then rectified these oversights with Touch of Evil: the 50th Anniversary Edition. In 2012, in celebration of its 100th Anniversary, Universal then debuted the deluxe 3-version edition of Touch of Evil on Blu-ray. Now we get Touch of Evil in 4K. Is it worth the upgrade? Personally, I don’t really see the point to this re-re-re-reissue. Like the aforementioned anniversary edition, the 4K contains all three edits of the film presented in anamorphic widescreen. The theatrical and preview versions contain the overlay of credits and extemporaneous music written by Henry Mancini. But the restored version reinstates Welles’ original concept for the prologue, laying in various organic tracks of music and effects without a main title sequence.

Universal had seamlessly-branched all three versions on a single Blu-ray disc. Kino Lorber separates each version on its own disc – a definite plus! Universal’s 2012 effort was very strong. Kino’s new 4K marginally advances with better contrast and blacks that are understandably richer/deeper with zero crush. Kino has also ported over Universal’s DTS 2.0 audio. As per extras, we gain a new audio commentary from historian, Tim Lucas on the theatrical cut. This, in addition to the pre-existing commentary from writer/filmmaker, F.X. Feeney, recorded in 2009. The theatrical cut also contains a theatrical trailer. On the ‘reconstructed’ cut, we get a new audio commentary by historian, Imogen Sara Smith, and the commentary recorded by Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and reconstruction producer, Rick Schmidlin from 2012.  We also get Evil Lost and Found – a nearly 20-min. featurette produced in 2012. Disc 3 contains the prevue cut, and ports over the audio commentary assembled from interviews that predate all of these Blu-ray releases, plus the featurette, Bringing Evil to Life. This too runs just a little over 20-mins.  Bottom line: Touch of Evil in any form is not a Welles’ masterpiece, though it exhibits some of the master’s grand touches throughout. Would it have been a better movie had Welles been allowed to stick with it? Debatable. Like much of the lore that continues to surround Orson Welles, the greatness in his body of art is something we will never know first-hand, but have been expected to take at face value by critics since committing their authorship to his ever-lasting worship and exaltation.  Touch of Evil in 4K? Duly noted improvements to overall image quality, especially when viewed in projection. On TV monitors, even 85-inches in size, squint about a foot away from the screen and you’ll likely see what all the fuss is about.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

4 (across all 3 versions)

EXTRAS

3.5