Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958; 108 mins.)

PRINCIPAL CAST
actor	role
Charlton Heston	Ramon Miguel "Mike" Vargas
Janet Leigh	Susan Vargas
Orson Welles	Capt. Hank Quinlan
Joseph Calleia	Pete Menzies
Akim Tamiroff	"Uncle Joe" Grandi
Valentin de Vargas	"Pancho"
Ray Collins	District Attorney Adair
Dennis Weaver	Motel Clerk (the "Night Man")
Joanna Moore	Marcia Linnekar
Mort Mills	Schwartz
Marlene Dietrich	Tanya
Victor Millan	Manolo Sanchez
Lalo Rios	Risto
Michael Sargent	Pretty Boy
Mercedes McCambridge	Gang Leader (the "brunette")
Zsa Zsa Gabor	Owner of Strip Joint
Phil Harvey	Blaine
Joi Lansing	Zita (Mr. Linnekar's companion)
Harry Shannon	Police Chief Gould

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Producer	Alfred Zugsmith, Universal Studios
Director	Orson Welles
Screenplay	Orson Welles, from an earlier script by Paul Monash, based on Whit Masterson's novel Badge of Evil
Director of Photography	Russell Metty
Art Directors	Alexander Golitzen, Robert Clatworthy
Costumes	Bill Thomas
Music	Henry Mancini
Sound	Leslie I. Carey, Frank Wilkinson
Editors	Virgil Vogel, Aaron Stell, Edward Curtiss

Director

Orson Welles (1915–1985) was one of the most imaginative and influential artists in the history of film. Deemed a genius from boyhood, he made his Broadway debut as an actor in Shakespeare at eighteen, began radio work at nineteen, and directed Macbeth and Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock for the Federal Theatre Project at twenty-two. For the next two years, he continued his radio work—producing, directing, acting in adaptations of classics—and became internationally notorious at twenty-three with his production of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. At twenty-four, he signed a contract with RKO Studios to work as producer, director, writer, and actor on two films, at that time the most generous and famous contract in Hollywood history.

His first feature film, Citizen Kane (1941), changed the way movies were made and the thematic and stylistic directions they would follow. Although it was misunderstood by the general public, it was recognized by the most influential critics as demonstrating a totally new approach to filmmaking, and it has repeatedly been voted the most important movie in the history of the art. The movie deeply angered William Randolph Hearst, the powerful media magnate on whose life it was partly based, and by the time Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), was released, Hearst had made certain that Welles was virtually finished in Hollywood. The industry's general resentment of the "boy genius" ensured that his departure was ignominious.

For the rest of his life, Welles continued to work in theater and radio, and he directed thirteen more films: The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report, 1955), Touch of Evil (1958), Fountain of Youth (1956) , The Trial ( Le Procès, 1962), Chimes at Midnight (Campanadas a medianoche, 1966), The Immortal Story (1968), The Deep (1970), F for Fake (Vérités et mensonges, 1975), and Filming Othello (1979). Welles began several major film projects that were never completed, including Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind; It's All True was completed by colleagues and friends and released in 1993. Among the films about Welles are The Orson Welles Story (1980), The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1992), Vassili Silovic's Orson Welles: The One-Man Band (1996), Benjamin Ross's RKO 281 (1999), and Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock (1999).

As a screenwriter, Welles wrote (or cowrote, in the case of Citizen Kane) the screenplays of the films he directed, often repeating the same themes, particularly the idea that reality was a labyrinth without a center, the impossibility of one person truly knowing another, love and the betrayal of love, the interaction of free will and fate, and the ambiguities of behavior. As an actor, he created an unsurpassed gallery of memorable roles, both in films by other directors and in his own—including Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, Shakespearian heroes (Macbeth, Othello, Falstaff, and Lear), and Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil. Welles received every honor imaginable in the world of motion pictures and is the subject of a seemingly endless stream of articles, books, biographies, and stylistic studies. He has probably inspired more people to become movie directors, and had more influence on those who did, than any other director in history.

Cinematographer

Russell Metty (1906–1978), the cinematographer on Touch of Evil, was a veteran Hollywood cameraman who had worked with Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Stranger (1946). Famous for his mastery of black-and-white cinematography, twilight and night shooting, and complex crane shots, Metty was ideal for Touch of Evil. Although much of the overall cinematographic plan of the film and many of its most distinctive shots remind us of Welles's collaboration with Gregg Toland on Citizen Kane, Welles and Metty work together here to create their own unique vision—a version of the film noir look.

production and restoration

Irony surrounds the making, release, restoration, and critical reputation of Touch of Evil. Prior to making it, Welles had not worked in Hollywood for almost ten years, and originally he was slated only to act in the film. But Charlton Heston, much in demand after his success playing Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's second version of The Ten Commandments (1956), agreed to appear in the film on the condition that Welles not only act but also write and direct.

While Welles wanted to make a stylish film that was commercially acceptable, Universal Studios regarded it as a "B" movie. During production, the studio plagued Welles with intensive supervision, but he finished the film to their initial satisfaction, completed the first cut with editor Aaron Stell, and then went to South America to begin work on another film. Confused by Welles's handling of the narrative, the studio asked director Harry Keller to shoot additional footage, then brought in Ernest Nims, Universal's head of postproduction, and a new editor, Virgil Vogel, to reedit Welles's first cut in a more conventional style. Although Welles was prohibited from participating in the completion of the final print, he saw it before release and wrote a long memorandum with complete instructions on how he hoped the studio would return the film to his original vision.^[1] It is a serious, detailed, and deferential memorandum—a virtual textbook on filmmaking—passionate about film in general and Touch of Evil in particular. With a few minor exceptions, the studio ignored his wishes, and the film was released as the second half of a double bill, whose first half was Harry Keller's Female Animal (1958), starring Hedy Lamarr. The public responded indifferently, in part because of the studio's confusing changes. Considered by many a classic neonoir reworking of the detective thriller, Touch of Evil eventually influenced numerous films, including Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), John Sayles's Lone Star (1996), and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997).

When parts of Welles's memorandum were published in 1992, efforts were begun to restore the film to the director's specifications, to make what is known as a "director's final cut." The result, fashioned by producer Rick Schmidlin and editor Walter Murch, appeared in 1998.^[2] The new version's many changes restored coherence and clarity to Welles's narrative and were received with almost universal praise. This case study is based on the restored version.

title

Paul Monash's original script was titled Badge of Evil, as was the 1956 pulp novel by Whit Masterson (the pseudonym of Robert A. Wade and H. Billy Miller) on which it was based. In creating his shooting script, Welles changed the title to Touch of Evil, underscoring small but significant differences. Behind his police badge, which figures in a brief moment of self-imposed martyrdom, Quinlan is evil. Welles's touch implies that Quinlan is not alone. Evil can be acquired, transferred, and imparted, so it is not an absolute condition. Everyone in the world of this movie has the potential to be both evil and good.

Script: generic conventions

Touch of Evil adapts narrative and stylistic conventions from several overlapping genres: thrillers, crime and detective films, and film noir. Welles made major changes in Monash's script, introducing the theme of racism and some characters' depiction of Mexicans and other foreigners as sinister threats to the American way of life. These attitudes are evident in Quinlan's conscious hatred of Mexico and Mexicans, his reference to the United States as "civilization," his unease with the Vargas marriage ("She don't look Mexican"), and his mocking of the relationship between Marcia Linnekar and Manolo Sanchez, whom he consistently calls "boy." Menzies can't understand why a "foreigner" like Vargas is permitted to use the Hall of Records, and the crime boss Grandi tries to shield himself from prejudice by protesting "The name ain't Mexican." Susan Vargas prefers "her country" to Mexico, if only for comfort, and calls her husband Mike rather than Miguel. Welles further altered Monash's approach to the narrative point of view by beginning with an omniscient camera and later shifting between two or three parallel narrative lines. He moved the setting from Southern California to Los Robles, and, by casting Marlene Dietrich, Akim Tamiroff, and Dennis Weaver in eccentric roles, underscored the grotesque aspects of the movie's vision. Welles further reinforced that vision through details such as Quinlan's act, when nervous, of squashing the pigeon's egg and the fun made of Grandi's toupee. In his excellent study of Welles's script, John Stubbs notes that Welles stayed within the familiar boundaries of the genres with which he was working, seeking not to transcend them but rather "to make Touch of Evil as intriguing and as viscerally disturbing as he could."^[3] He clearly incorporated certain elements of films that came before his. For example, the opening sequence is famous not only for its cinematography but also, as Terry Comito points out, for the explosion that occurs within it, a violent action that links it to the opening sequences of such precursors as Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1931), Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932), William Wyler's The Letter (1940), Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949), and Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955).^[4] While Welles pokes fun at the genre by having Susan call Grandi an "old-fashioned, jug-eared, lop-sided Little Caesar . . . [who has] been seeing too many gangster movies," he also pays genuine homage to it and to several directors who made it famous. However, the violent action that begins the film also has several narrative functions specific to Touch of Evil: it immediately raises questions that the plot action must answer, involving us in its world, disorienting us as viewers, and depriving us of a fixed point of reference from which to judge the characters and action.

narrative

Touch of Evil involves a cross-cultural clash between two strong, willful men: Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), an old, corrupt, but popular police captain on the U.S. side of the border, who intimidates his superiors, takes bribes, conceals evidence, hides his own weaknesses behind his badge, and is haunted by the death of his wife many years before; and Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston), a young, idealistic narcotics reformer in the Mexican government, who has just married a woman from Philadelphia named Susan (Janet Leigh). Responding to the opening explosion, both men are lured into a fantastic yet somehow plausible adventure down a cinematic rabbit hole in the surreal world of Los Robles. The movie presents the world on the U.S.-Mexico border as a labyrinth without a center, one of Welles's favorite paradigms for reality. Los Robles is a puzzle that betrays our expectations as well as those of the characters. Quinlan thinks he knows this world so well that he can control all aspects of it, which Vargas makes it his business to decode. At the end, a policeman who runs to the scene of Quinlan's undoing comments that he was a "great detective," to which Tanya adds, "But a lousy cop. He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?" The film "does not really conclude, come to rest, with its happy ending,"^[5] for just as the Vargases walk unknowingly into the labyrinth, so they drive away from it. Los Robles remains dangerous, waiting for anyone unfortunate enough to cross the border.

Cinematography and Meaning

Welles's cinematic style has often been called baroque. In particular, Welles consistently exaggerates lighting for greater contrasts and camera angles to define characters and situations. Within the deep-space, deep-focus look presented by the wide-angle lens, he uses extreme high- and low-angle shots to distort, magnify, or dwarf his characters, much as baroque or mannerist painters tend to utilize complex perspectival systems, elongated forms, and intensely posed figures whose appearance and gestures are strained. As a result, Welles's characters sometimes do not even fit the frame, but loom out of it. In employing such a complex, flamboyant style, the director takes familiar film noir effects to new heights of expression, developing themes of revenge, decay, law and justice, love of country, position in life, and self. But he also moves beyond storytelling, self-reflexively calling attention to technique and to himself as a filmmaker.

Touch of Evil's first two sequences announce that the cinematographic plan will fuse cinematic realism and expressionism. Whereas the opening scene is characterized by fluid choreography of movement and camera work, the second scene, as Comito writes, is "a jagged montage sequence. Instead of the graceful movement of the crane, we get a tilted, hand-held camera; instead of a labyrinthine density of space, we get a set of disconnected fragments—flame, wreckage, shouting men, looming headlights, abrupt closeups—that we find difficult to assemble into a single spatial field."^[6]

Welles uses such montage again in the sequence of Grandi's murder, cutting quickly, disrupting the continuity of framing, shifting spatial relations, distorting faces, and alternating high- and low-angle shots, long shots and close-ups. Look carefully at this scene, and you'll understand how completely Welles manipulates space and time, sight and sound. All the film's cinematographic elements—black-and-white film stock, camera movement and angles, lighting—work together as a complex system to create meaning. As the 1998 restoration demonstrates, even a single shot can upset that system. In the original release, the shot appeared in the crucial scene in the Hall of Records where Vargas confronts Menzies with his discovery that Quinlan has a long record of falsifying evidence to get indictments and convictions. Quinlan's loyal sidekick becomes so distraught that he grabs the papers from Vargas's hands, staggers backward, and attempts to defend Quinlan's reputation. At this point, the studio inserted a new shot of Menzies collapsing momentarily on a table, followed by a close-up of his agonized face. Quickly regaining composure, he jumps up and continues to defend Quinlan. In his memorandum to Universal, Welles expressed apprehension that this weird close-up would "upset" the audience. Menzies's look, as Welles knew, revealed his complicity to Vargas. As a result, his helping Vargas in the last half hour of the film made little sense. During the restoration, that close-up was removed, thus returning Menzies to the moral station that Welles—who described Touch of Evil as a story of love and betrayal between Menzies and Quinlan—originally intended. Later, Menzies acknowledges Quinlan's betrayal by giving Vargas the cane that Quinlan leaves in the hotel room after he murders Grandi. Of course, Quinlan betrays Menzies again when he shoots him on the bridge. Menzies's final act—shooting Quinlan—is now part of a coherent narrative.

lighting

Throughout his career, Welles's overall conception of lighting, as well as framing and camera angles, was greatly influenced by German expressionist films of the 1920s. In Touch of Evil, he adapts this style through bold contrasts in blacks and whites that exaggerate the reality of Los Robles, thus helping to establish the moral climate of the labyrinth. The nighttime exterior shots juxtapose glaring neon lights with dimly lit buildings. The direct sun used in the daytime shots on the road to the motel and at the motel itself are equally expressionistic, isolating the characters against the desert landscape.

The nature of the film's lighting is further influenced by the time during which the narrative unfolds. The plot duration is a twenty-four-hour period presented in three basic parts that conform to the chronological passage of time. Their screen duration is, respectively, about twenty-six minutes, thirty-four minutes, and forty-eight minutes. (The film makes no reference to these "parts," which are here used solely for purposes of analysis.) The first part begins in the evening, when the Linnekar and Vargas parties cross the border, and ends at dawn, with Vargas and Susan leaving for the motel; here Welles uses highly expressionistic black-and-white tones to delineate the town and its constituent environs. The second part, which begins with the new day and includes substantial parts of the plot, concludes around dusk; the lighting is mostly natural, including early-morning haze, high white clouds and bright sun during midday, and soft tones at twilight. The third part begins at twilight, continues through Vargas's entrapment of Quinlan on the bridge, and ends when Vargas crosses that symbolic bridge, reunites with his wife, and tells her they are going "home"; in it, Welles uses the same lighting pattern as in the first part.

The lighting is also influenced by Welles's use of settings, primarily exterior ones. The film was shot in Venice, California, a Los Angeles suburb whose founders hoped to imitate Italy's Venice but that had mostly deteriorated to slums and ruins by the time the film was made. Thus it was the ideal choice to represent Los Robles. In the darkness of the night, the shadowy arcaded pedestrian passageways, ruined bridges and canals, and open spaces punctuated by oil-drilling rigs provide excellent spaces in which to use lighting that dramatically calls attention to faces, hands, movements, and other fragments that would not be nearly as ominous in daylight. The many sources of light include lamps along the sidewalks, suspended above intersections, and shining out from windows; lights on the emergency vehicles that rush to the site of the explosion; neon lights on shops, bars, and restaurants; harsh outdoor spotlights at the Mirador motel; and highly theatrical sources of artificial light positioned below characters to cast shadows upward on their faces. Notice how often most of the screen space remains dark so that light frames a character within it (e.g., at the end, when Menzies is standing on Tanya's front porch trying to get Quinlan to come out, or when the lights and shadows on the oil rigs make these machines seem sinister as they quietly pump).

Interior lighting also plays up contrasts between light and dark. This is particularly evident when exterior light, cast through Venetian blinds, appears as angular bars of light and dark tones on a room's ceiling, walls, and floors. This classic film noir technique helps create meaning in, for example, the ominous scene in Marcia Linnekar's apartment. The interplay of light and shadow once again underscores the differences between Quinlan's taking the law into his own hands and Vargas's insisting on doing things correctly. Quinlan physically and verbally abuses Sanchez, insults Menzies, taunts Vargas, and relies on false evidence. Vargas accuses Quinlan of planting the dynamite to frame Sanchez. As Quinlan steps out of the apartment into the broad daylight and literally into the arms of Grandi, who is just waiting to make a deal, the burden of proving guilt shifts from him to Vargas. Similarly, when Vargas arrives at the Grandi-owned Mirador motel he finds the clerk cowering, framed by bright light on the office wall; and shadows of the gang members fall across Susan Vargas's face as they begin to stage their assault on her (a technique Welles used throughout Citizen Kane—Kane's shadow falling across Susan Alexander's face as a visual equivalent of his dominance over her).

Perhaps the most impressive example of falling shadows is the flashing neon light that permeates rooms in the Ritz Hotel, which Grandi also owns. We first see it shortly after the film begins, when Susan is taken to meet Grandi in a private room off the hotel lobby. Because the room itself is brightly lit with interior lamps, the effect of the flashing light is greatly diminished, but it foreshadows the gruesome scene when they are together again at the hotel the next night—when Quinlan murders Grandi and throws him across the headboard of the bed on which Susan lies drugged. This flashing light not only accentuates the terror that Grandi (and we) feel as Quinlan clumsily bashes Grandi around the room, actually driving him up the wall as he attempts to climb out a transom window, but also the shock that awaits Susan as she opens her eyes and stares directly into the face of the dead Grandi, who has been so brutally strangled by Quinlan that his eyes seem almost to have popped out of his face. It is a grotesque scene, but it ends with a comic detail. As Quinlan staggers out and shuts the door, the camera picks up in the intermittent light a hand-scrawled sign on the back of the door: "Stop. Forget anything? Leave Key at Desk."

Framing

While the framing reflects the omniscient-camera point of view, Welles makes maximum expressive use of deep-space composition and deep-focus cinematography. These techniques enable us to see many things happening at many levels within individual shots, especially long takes, during which the cinematographer can reframe and thereby change emphasis. Thus the irony of a situation can become evident within the frame, without any other comment. An excellent example of this method occurs near the end of the film, when Quinlan phones Menzies from the Ritz Hotel, just before he kills Grandi. Menzies is at the police station, questioning Sanchez, and Welles uses a classic composition: Menzies in the left foreground in a medium close-up; middle ground space; in the right background, a three-paneled window, through which we see a police officer standing in the left pane, Sanchez under interrogation in the middle pane, and another officer in the right pane. The composition draws our eyes in a hard diagonal line from left foreground to right background. We hear Menzies on the phone, but the window prevents us from hearing the interrogation. The irony is that Quinlan orders Menzies to "break" Sanchez, as part of his continuing revenge against Mexicans, while he is about to murder his other nemesis, Grandi—another "touch" of evil.

When Menzies confronts Vargas in the Hall of Records, they stand in the middle ground between rows of file cabinets, but the shot's depth, extending into an infinity of files, suggests by association an even larger degree of corruption than is revealed in the single file folder that Vargas holds. Later, after Quinlan has voluntarily and theatrically returned his police badge to Chief Gould and stormed from the room, we see, in a wide hall outside the room, Quinlan (in the far-left background), the district attorney (in the middle), and Gould (in the near-right foreground). While this composition perfectly illustrates the rule of thirds, it also plays a narrative function, demonstrating in yet another way how Quinlan controls his superiors and thus the entire town. In an attempt to persuade Quinlan to recant his resignation, both Chief Gould and District Attorney Adair move nervously about, realizing that Quinlan can bring them down with him. But (if we read through to the grid metaphor suggested by the rule of thirds), they cannot reach the sector that he occupies because he is the master of the entire scheme. They are, in fact, trapped in Quinlan's web. (By the way, this is one studio-added scene that Welles approved of.)

Framing is also used to develop character. For example, we first see Quinlan in a very low-angle medium shot as he steps out of his car to investigate the explosion. The shot immediately establishes him as taking charge: his obese bulk fills the frame, his face is unshaven, his eyes are baggy from loss of sleep, and his clothes are unkempt. In a moment, he meets Vargas, and the fact that they will become adversaries—each capable in his own way of looming over events—is suggested by the camera's shooting Vargas from a similar low-angle medium close-up. Shortly thereafter, Susan is lured to a meeting with Grandi at the Ritz Hotel. The scene begins with the camera at eye-level, but as the tension increases between them and Grandi becomes angrier, the low-angle shot emphasizes his grotesque appearance. When Quinlan and Grandi meet in one of Grandi's bars to join forces, the framing and angles keep them on an even plane even though Quinlan has no intention of letting Grandi win.

One of the best overall illustrations of the cinematographic style of Touch of Evil occurs in the elaborate scene in which Quinlan murders Grandi. Forty-nine of its seventy-nine shots relate the central action, beginning with Quinlan's "Turn out the lights!" (a telling association of the resultant darkness with the evil that is to occur), climaxing in the murder, and concluding as Quinlan looks back into the room as he slowly closes the door. The principal illumination comes from the flashing sign outside, which makes the spectacle of a corrupt police officer murdering his gangster "partner" all the more sinister. The struggle is framed by shots that emphasize Quinlan's aggressive bulk and Grandi's cowering attempts to get away. The shooting (and editing) strategy involves alternating low- and high-angle shots; mixing long shots, medium shots, and close-ups; and using the handheld camera both to bring the viewer as close as possible to the action and to emphasize Quinlan's ferocity.

In the scene in Rancho Grande that follows Grandi's murder, Welles typically uses framing that calls attention to itself. This long shot, involving deep-space composition, is framed by the spread legs of a stripper dancing on the bar; through her legs, we see patrons in the middle ground and, in the background, another stripper and Vargas rushing in from right to left. The shot ends when the camera tracks back to reveal the stripper's whole figure. In line with the downward descent that began as Vargas crossed the border at the beginning of the film, the shot shows him plunging deeper into Grandi's world of corruption while deciding to take Los Robles into his own hands: "I'm no cop now. I'm a husband! Where is my wife? My wife!" He looks both out of character and out of place here, punching members of Grandi's gang, but he is saved when Schwartz enters and tells him that Susan has been charged with murder and jailed. Symbolically, his descent has reached the bottom of its arc, and all his energies now turn to saving Susan, apprehending Quinlan, and moving upward and out of Los Robles.

Camera Movement

Touch of Evil employs every kind of camera movement, including tracking shots, crane shots, and shots made with the handheld camera. As we have already seen above, Welles uses the moving camera in combination with the long take to follow characters' movements; to reframe for inclusion, exclusion, or emphasis within the shot; and to create relationships between characters and other elements in the mise-en-scène that translate into meaning. In the opening sequence, where the buildings we see are one or two stories high, the crane-mounted camera gives us what amounts to an aerial, wide-angle view that enfolds the town in a labyrinth of expressionistic light and shadow. We may think we know what is going on here, but Welles does everything possible to disorient us.^[7]

Throughout the opening, the camera moves back and ahead of the main characters (i.e., the characters follow the camera rather than the other way around). The camera is omniscient; it is not identified with the consciousness of any character in the film. The main characters move with apparent free will toward the border station, but as they cross each others' paths, their destinies will inevitably be linked. The Linnekar car and the Vargases (on foot) are coming from opposite directions: leaving from the direction of their Mexican hotel, the Vargases are crossing to the U.S. side for an ice cream soda; departing from the U.S. side, Mr. Linnekar and Zita, his companion, are crossing into Mexico. In leading these characters to the climactic explosion, the camera lures them to where it wants them to go, and it then reunites them in the frame just before the explosion. It also creates the reason for Vargas's confrontation with Quinlan, a delicate matter of jurisdiction that Vargas understands is his. When this annoys Quinlan, the conflict between the two begins. Vargas pursues his inquiry, hoping that his wife will stay put in their hotel, but she gets them both into more trouble by being inquisitive about taunts from the local men as well as provocative. Welles also uses several crane shots to transform the moving and omniscient camera into a voyeuristic camera, notably when the camera travels up the side of Susan's hotel to watch as a thug in an adjoining building annoys her with a flashlight. Not all of the moving shots are as successful, however; sometimes the process shots (Vargas driving Susan to the motel, Vargas and Schwartz speeding recklessly through the streets of Los Robles) needlessly call attention to themselves.

for Further Reading

Andrew, Dudley. Film in the Aura of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Bazin, André. "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema." In What Is Cinema? sel. and trans. Hugh Gray, 1:23–40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

---. Orson Welles: A Critical View. Trans. Jonathan Rosenbaum. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

Bazin, André, Charles Bitsch, and Jean Domarchi. "Interview with Orson Welles." In Touch of Evil, ed. Terry Comito, 199–212. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985 .

Belton, John. "A New Map of the Labyrinth: The Unretouched Touch of Evil." Movietone News, 21 January 1976, 1–9.

Bogdanovich, Peter. The Cinema of Orson Welles. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961.

Comito, Terry. "Touch of Evil." In Focus on Orson Welles, ed. Ronald Gottesman. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976. 157–63.

Goldfarb, Phyllis. "Orson Welles' Use of Sound." In Focus on Orson Welles. Ed. Ronald Gottesman, 85–95. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976.

Houston, Beverle. "Power and Dis-Integration in the Films of Orson Welles." Film Quarterly 35 (summer 1982): 2–12.

Jameson, Richard T. "An Infinity of Mirrors." In Focus on Orson Welles, ed. Ronald Gottesman, 66–84. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976.

Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies: A Guide from A to Z. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982.

McBride, Joseph. Orson Welles. New York: Viking Press, 1972.

Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson Welles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir." In Awake in the Dark: An Anthology of American Film Criticism, 1915 to the Present, ed. David Denby, 278–90. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Welles, Orson, and Peter Bogdanovich. This Is Orson Welles. Ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

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^[1]The continuity script for the original (not restored) version is available in Terry Comito, ed., Touch of Evil: Orson Welles, Director (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985, 45–172); the memorandum is available on the DVD release (Warner Bros., 2000) of the restored film.

^[2]Walter Murch, "Restoring the Touch of Genius to a Classic," New York Times, 6 September 1998, sec. 2, pp. 1, 16–17. See also Lawrence French, " Touch of Evil: An Interview with Rick Schmidlin" 2000 <film.tierranet.com/directors/o.wells/> (September 2002).

^[3]John Stubbs, "The Evolution of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil from Novel to Film," in Touch of Evil, ed. Terry Comito (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 193.

^[4]Terry Comito, "Welles's Labyrinths: An Introduction to Touch of Evil," in Comito, ed., Touch of Evil, 5–8.

^[5]Comito, "Welles's Labyrinths," 29.

^[6]Comito, "Welles's Labyrinths," 16.

^[7]See Comito's detailed description of the scene, including a diagram of the final moment ("Welles's Labyrinths," 8–10), as well as the discussion of the alternating of different lines of the narrative: Stephen Heath, "Film and System: Terms of Analysis," in Comito, ed., Touch of Evil, Terry Comito (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 259–74.