Touch of Evil (1958)

QFS No. 160 - The invitation for December 11, 2024
Let’s get this out of the way first – in Touch of Evil (1958) Charleton Heston plays a Mexican.* (But… barely.) Do with that information what you will. For me, this is just about the only negative I have about this film. Everything else in Orson Welles’ masterpiece places it high on my list of personal favorites.

This is our first Welles film since Chimes at Midnight (1965, QFS No. 36) which kicked off the beginning of 2021 for us. Now as we wind down 2024, we revisit the auteur in one of the finest examples of film noir you can find. The opening shot alone is worth the price of admission (rental), which is how I first encountered the movie. A professor in college showed us this shot in class, stating that it’s probably the first (and maybe only?) continuous tracking shot that spans two countries,** and I was immediately hooked. And the fact that it was made in 1958, before the advent of Steadicam and sophisticated Technocrane systems makes it even more stunning.

Touch of Evil is a masterclass in staging and directing. You can see aspects of the director’s visual style from Citizen Kane (1941) here throughout, but this time in a crime and police procedural in which two detectives from two countries have to work together. Welles’ staggering physical presence is also something to behold in Touch of Evil – especially if you have in mind a young Charles Foster Kane.

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*In the 1995 movie Get Shorty, John Travolta’s character tells Rene Russo that Touch of Evil is playing in the theater and asks if she wants to join him and go see “Charleton Heston play a Mexican.” Which I think might be the first time I had heard of Touch of Evil and, yes, that piqued my curiosity.

**Another border-crime-based film we selected, Sicario (2015, QFS No. 153), does have a continuous shot that spans two countries but with a drone so … that’s cheating, isn’t it?

Touch of Evil (1958) Directed by Orson Welles

Reactions and Analyses:
The border between the United States and Mexico is the central locale of Touch of Evil (1958), the explosion and murder having taken place on the US side but the explosives having come from the Mexico side. The border is a physical space, but it’s the metaphoric nature of the border, the blurring of that line, that concerns Orson Welles throughout the film.

There’s a sense early on in the film that it’s not entirely clear which side of the border we are in at first in a given scene, the Mexican side of the American side. I recall having this slight confusion when I first saw the film nearly 25 years ago, but in the years and several re-watches since, I concerned myself less with this physical place than others in our QFS discussion group watching Touch of Evil the first time. But it’s certainly the case that at times it’s not immediately obvious where we are – Mexico or the US. And maybe this is intentional?

Early on in Touch of Evil, we see Ramon Vargas (Charleton Heston) and Susan (Janet Leigh) cross from Mexico into the United States. But after that, at times their location as it pertains to the border is murky.

Welles’ ambiguity or lack of clarity on which side of the border we’re on appears to be deliberate. The border is neither here nor there, a between space that’s trying to create an artificial separation between the two. A fascinating place to set a crime and a movie – the in-between. And what happens in these in-between places? Shades of gray, ambiguous morality. Ramon Miguel Vargas (Charleton Heston) says, “This isn't the real Mexico. You know that. All border towns bring out the worst in a country.”

And in this, as the story unfolds Welles indeed shows some unsavory behavior on both sides of that dividing line and the filmmaker flips our expectations in this borderland. The “good cop,” the one holding up American ideals of justice, due process, innocent until proven guilty – that’s Vargas, the Mexican officer, from a place that is often portrayed as lawless and dangerous. It’s Hank Quinlan (Welles) who’s the “bad cop,” who skirts the law, who does things his own way in a manner of the Old West.

The “good cop” is Mexican.

The “bad cop” Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) is the American.

At the heart of Touch of Evil lies a central tension we find at the heart of many movies and series that take place in the world of criminal justice today – two competing visions of “justice.” Vargas goes after criminals but does it “by the book.” Some version of this code: there are people who commit crime and evil out in the world, and we put them away without compromising ourselves and our ideals. Quinlan is something closer to there is evil in the world so let’s not mess around by letting the courts and the lawyers screw things up and let these evil-doers go free. To put it another way, to catch monsters you have to become a monster.

Depending on the show, your hero is either the cop who goes by the book or the one who doesn’t. Both approaches to criminal justice have been lionized, but I’m guessing the one who breaks the rules to ensure the “bad guys” get put behind bars is the one we’ve come to see as our hero - a law-breaking good-guy to be admired on the screen. In Touch of Evil, Welles makes it clear that Vargas is the protagonist and Quinlan, at best, the antihero.

Quinlan takes up drinking and reminisces about his departed wife.

But he’s not “evil” or even a villain. There’s a fleeting moment where a drunken Quinlan shares a little of the motivation behind his particular brand of justice. His wife was strangled to death and the memory haunts him, drives him to prevent anything like that happening to anyone else. Is this justification for causing the suffering and misery of others? Vargas doesn’t think so and ultimately convinces his sergeant Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia) that while they may have put some guilty people away, they definitely planted evidence and abused their power.

The most surprising turn is Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia) who starts off as a sycophant but realizes the error and illegality of his partner Quinlan’s ways.

By the end of the film, Quinlan’s misdeeds catch up with him, thanks to Vargas exposing his past and with Menzies. Perhaps the most unexpected turns of in the film is Menzies’ who starts as an apparent sycophant but later on reveals a surprising moral compass. It’s his sergeant’s “betrayal” to Quinlan, after all, that leads to his ultimate downfall and the death of both of them.

Quinlan’s final moments.

But in the end, after Quinlan is dying, we hear that the suspect Sanchez (Victor Millan) admitted to being guilty of killing his lover’s father, Rudy Linnekar a local construction magnate (Jeffrey Green) and his girlfriend. Whether this is a real confession or a coerced one, the fact is that someone has confessed to the crime. So was Quinlan right – should he have just planted the explosives on Sanchez and the case would’ve been wrapped up? Is he vindicated, is his way of doing things actually more effective and efficient? This is an unanswerable question for sure, but one thing is certain – the chain of events of the film would not have happened, Quinlan would be alive, Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) would also be alive, and Susan (Janet Leigh) wouldn’t have been drugged had Vargas not known and exposed the truth.

These dynamics play out in a film we selected at Quarantine Film Society recently – Sicario (2015, QFS No. 153). Another film that plays with the lawless nature of border towns, Sicario blurs the line between right and wrong but isn’t leaving it ambiguous, the filmmakers clearly have an opinion. In their version, the conflict at the modern border is a war, and as such the rules of war apply, not the rules of justice, law and order. Those ideas are quaint, antiquated, and useless in a borderland conflict where that conflict is military, not a law enforcement issue.

In Sicario (2015, QFS No. 153) the border is a war zone, not an in-between ambiguity as it is in Touch of Evil.

Welles appears to differ. If anything, even though Quinlan is ultimately right, his methods lead to destruction and death – including his own. This appears to be an indictment of the lawless man doing whatever he can to get results. Sicario believes the opposite.

Story aside, Welles gives a masterclass in staging just as he did seventeen years earlier in Citizen Kane (1941). Here, he fills the frame with his detectives, shoots everyone a little low angled – especially himself, giving Quinlan a massive presence in the frame. He’s imposing, terrifying. And Vargas mostly is on his own in the frame, heroic, the only good cop in a crooked world. The filmmaking, the camerawork, the snappy dialogue. If people want an example of noir, Touch of Evil is it.

There’s one undercurrent, though, that Welles submerges in the story, and that’s of race. The one thing about a border story between the US and Mexico is that race, class, capitalism – all of these play a huge part in any modern tale taking place along that dividing line. Sanchez, if he is ultimately guilty, was driven to do it because his girlfriend Marcia Linnekar’s (Joanna Moore) white father wouldn’t approve of her being in a relationship with him, a Mexican. The father Rudy Linnekar is the one who was murdered - so for the white American detectives, this is a plain and clear motive and add the fact that he’s from Mexico … well, it’s all an open and shut case. Just let Quinlan handle the particulars.

The interracial newlyweds in Touch of Evil.

Vargas has just married Susan, and her actions can be interpreted as either naïve (she goes off with a Grandi gang member after all) or perhaps she feels safe being the wife of a senior Mexican narcotics officer. She’s brash, strong-willed, throws a light blub out of the window in anger at people peeping in on her. She feels as if nothing will happen to her – because she’s a white American? Maybe. And Vargas, for his part, “doesn’t sound like a Mexican.” (Of course this is because Heston doesn’t use an accent at all really.) But the American cops’ implications are is clear – maybe he’s not like one of them and we need to work around him. Race and nationality comes up throughout the film – even Uncle Joe Grandi says he’s an American citizen, using it as a shield to say how good he is. Welles deploys this throughout – not so much that it’s overwhelming, but enough to be unavoidable.

Welles asks - in a dark world, who do you trust? A man willing to do anything to put evil-doers behind bars (even if they might be innocent)? Or a man who goes after the corrupt but is beholden to rules that may allow the corrupt to buy their way back to freedom? Or is it not as simple as all of that? The exploration of these ideas is what makes Touch of Evil endure beyond its pulpy noir, and its artistry is what cements it as a classic.

From the film’s opening after the car explodes in the United States with explosives from Mexico.