Movie Review: Touch of Evil

ROUNDUP REVIEW: TOUCH OF EVIL

(The following is from a previous review by Tribune movie critic Michael Wilmington.)

Orson Welles' great 1958 byzantine thriller "Touch of Evil" still seems close to the pinnacle of film noir. Set in two hellish Mexican and American border towns, where a corrupt but brilliant California homicide detective (Welles' Hank Quinlan) battles a righteous Mexican narc (Charlton Heston).

Hired to direct "Touch of Evil" thanks to the insistence of Heston, Welles took over a project that began as a seedy cop thriller based on Whit Masterson's undistinguished novel "Badge of Evil" and fashioned something so weird and wonderful it has inspired moviemakers ever since.

"Touch" begins with a bang: the legendary three-minute tracking crane shot following saturnine Mexican narcotics cop Miguel Vargas (Heston) and his sexy, excitable new bride, Susie (Janet Leigh), through nighttime Los Robles, Mexico, to the U.S. border, while a bomb is planted in the car trunk of big shot Rudy Linnekar, exploding just as the love-starved honeymooners fall into their first movie clinch.

From then on, the movie evolves into a war of wits and morality between Vargas and local detective Quinlan, a mountainous, infallible sleuth who quickly fingers a killer - but whom Vargas suspects of framing suspects and planting evidence. As the two wage ethical war, more great oddball types join the fray: Marlene Dietrich as philosophical bordello madam Tanya, Akim Tamiroff as Mexican gang boss Joe Grandi, Joseph Calleia as Quinlan's right hand Pete Menzies, Mort Mills as upright Vargas-ally Schwarz, Mercedes McCambridge (uncredited) as a lesbian biker with a taste for pot, and Dennis Weaver as the hysterical "night man" at the local motel. (Alfred Hitchcock later picked both Leigh and Mills for "Psycho," besides casting Tony Perkins as his own "night man.")

When Welles rewrote, directed and co-starred in "Touch of Evil," after not making a Hollywood studio movie in 10 years, he was bursting with ideas. Wizardly moving camera shots, nightmarish angles and incredibly florid, amusing performances pack the movie. But Universal recut it without his consent, and only recently was the footage they excised restored. This is the second restored version, following the director's own 58-page memo to the studio: pure Welles and pure magic.

"Touch of Evil" (4 stars) opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., 773-871-6604, www.musicboxtheatre.com. No MPAA rating (includes some violence and drug content). Running time: 1:52.

- Michael Wilmington