A man takes a pretty woman over the border. Someone’s put a bomb in their trunk. In a masterful opening tracking shot we as the car makes it way across the border. So do Mike Vargas (Charleton Heston) and his just-married bride Susie (Janet Leigh). Mike is a cop, known for pursuing corruption, and chasing out the Grandis, a tough gang led by ‘Uncle’ Joe (Akim Tamiroff). Since Mike witnessed the bombing, and knows the device had to planted on the Mexican side of the border, he becomes involved in the investigation as – or as he says – an impartial observer. The main cop in charge is police Capitan Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles). Mike and Hank don’t go for each other at all, and Quinlan speaks of his instinct, gained from the game leg he has.

As Mike pursues his investigation, his wife is shadowed by the Grandi family. They decide to get a hotel away from town, but what neither knows is that the hotel is owned by Grandi himself. Even the clerk (Dennis Weaver) is nervous of this, but Susie gets pinned into the hotel, and set up as a drug addict. Meanwhile, Quinlan finds his suspect, but in an accident Mike accidentally knocked over an empty shoebox before the evidence contained therein incriminates the suspect. Mike knows that Quinlan is lying and pursues his false arrest while the boy is being interrogated. Quinlan resists the pressure, and is then accosted by Uncle Joe, who wants to make a bargain with him to take down Mike. Such leads both Quinlan and Vargas to make the other’s life more difficult.

In one of those great moments, Quinlan is a reformed drunk, ruined by the loss of his wife to a strangling, and refuses the drink Grandi offers him. With the drink sitting in front of him for so long, an involuntary impulse takes him over. He takes a stiff drink, and then says to Grandi “I don’t drink.” It’s poetry.

Orson Welles, that long abused and misunderstood genius directed Touch of Evil in 1958 for Universal Studios. The years in between it and The Magnificent Ambersons saw him struggling to work in the Hollywood system, and eventually working on his own projects, hustling internationally for financing. What projects did come out were usually mitigated by tampering. As Peter Bogdanovich will tell you, there once was a three hours cut of Lady from Shanghai. True to Hollywood form, Welles was not treated with respect on Touch of Evil, and when the studio brought in their own editor, he fleed the project, perhaps scared or too scarred – if Charleton Heston is to be believed. When he saw their cut, he wrote a 8 page memo asking for certain changes, all of which were ignored, while reshoots were done to help “straighten out” the narrative. But the labyrinthine narrative, which involves so many events that would be – in Hitchcockian parlance – Macguffins, was such that no amount of straightening could make it simplistic. You had to pay attention, or settle for the story of a battle of wills. The opening bombing simply sets the plot in motion, and though – and let me be clear on this – everything adds up, it’s not a story that lays itself bare. Instead you get a war between a young upstart and an old man, both with experience, one with an unflappable moral code, and the other having been around long enough to know that guilt is easier to sense than prove, and sometimes faking evidence is better than letting a guilty person off the hook.

There is so much to savor in this film. I haven’t even typed the words Film Noir until this point, but like Kiss Me Deadly, it’s hard not to argue that Touch of Evil was an endpoint for the genre. With Russell Metty’s gorgeous black and white photography, the black are as they should be in the genre: haunting, oppressive, corrupt, and palpable. Perhaps more than anything the rise of procedurals made the appeal of the noir less than for the big screen, as the genre moved towards action with Dirty Harry and the like. Hard to say.

Welles, already a man who was aware of his own legend, definitely gives Quinlan the opportunity to be a Lear. It’s always tempting to read biography into such roles but Quinlan’s undoubtedly sympathetic. Already a broken man before the film begins, Quinlan rules his roost in a strangely particular way. There is no denying that Quinlan is dirty, but there’s evidence in the film that he is, as the end exchange suggests, a “great detective” and “a lousy cop.”  Perhaps it is the story of the generational passing of things, as Vargas begins to abandon his principles once he realizes his wife has been put in the middle, and there is a suggestion of twinning, as Quinlan’s wife was strangled, but the sequence where it could go one way or the other is mitigated by the incident, and perhaps by the studio system. That, that idea for an ending would be entirely Wellsian.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has written at great length about Welles. Rosenbaum says that Welles is not his favorite director, but he finds him most fascinating, and too often that biographers have tried to write a narrative that is unbecoming, or suggests some blame for Welles’s fate, that too many people (including Pauline Kael) have tried to rob him of his greatest success (Kane) while then writing a narrative of the rest of his career that is both unfair to the filmmaker (in that the compromised films are less than) and to the films themselves. Touch of Evil was restored in 1998 using the 58 page memo, and though not a definitive director’s cut (nothing of the sort could exist with Welles long since gone), when you watch Touch of Evil in this version, you see one of the great directors of all time innovating, and having fun, and involving the audience. You see a masterpiece, and though that’s a word that is too loosely thrown around to be worth much, it could not be more applicable than here. 

Universal presents three cuts of the film. The original theatrical release (96 min.), the “preview version,” which was falsely labeled a director’s cut (109 min.), and the 1998 restoration cut (111 min.). If the restoration cut looks to include things, it does not – instead it has an opening crawl and a post credits sequence. Most of the changes are tweaks here and there but it stands as the most definitive release of the film, and likely that will ever be. The theatrical cut comes with commentary by F.X. Feeney, the preview cut with Rosenbaum and Welles scholar James Naremore, and the theatrical version with two commentaries, one with restoration producer Rick Schmidlin, and a second with a solo-Schmidlin track. Since Janet Leigh passed away in 2004 (not to mention Heston earlier this year), this must have been done around the time of the 98 restoration, and has been sitting in a can ever since. All versions of the film are presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.78:1) and 2.0 stereo, with all looking good, but with the restoration cut the best looking of the bunch. Extras on the disc include two featurettes: “Bringing Evil to Life” (21 min.) and “Evil Lost and Found” (17 min.). This featurettes were split into two for this disc, as everything one here saw the light of day about ten years ago as a documentary that aired around the time of the restoration, and (probably, like the commentary track with Leigh and Heston) has been sitting around since. I want to say it played on Bravo, and I’m pretty sure I have a video tape of it in my library. Comments come from Heston, Leigh, actor Valentin de Vargas, Rosenbaum, Schmidlin, restorationist Walter Murch, George Lucas and Curtis Hanson – among others. The film’s theatrical trailer is also included, and as a text, the 58 page memo, which comes in its own envelope.