Man oh man! Folks claim Orson Welles only had one titanic film in him, and they couldn't be more wrong. Since he began his career with his most masterful work, the variants on his genius cinema sense are dismissed as lesser: completely erroneous-...
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Man oh man! Folks claim Orson Welles only had one titanic film in him, and they couldn't be more wrong. Since he began his career with his most masterful work, the variants on his genius cinema sense are dismissed as lesser: completely erroneous- they're just different in their own manner.

I watched "Touch of Evil" (1958) last night as homage to the late Charlton Heston, cast here in his most unlikely role ever (Mexican national) and once again thrilled to the sure touch of Welles, besides its prescience. The film itself has everything a modern viewer could want: sex, drugs, rock and roll, leather-jacketed delinquents, addiction, police procedural, wiretapping, romance, immigration problems, betrayal, duplicity and total grey-area ethos.

How the film looks while Welles juggles these modernistic ingedients is well nigh astounding. Like Kubrick and Kurosawa, every shot matters in its pure visual qualities to draw the viewer into some part of the bigger complications. One of the dang most famous shots ever in the history of all cinema resides here. The opening shot is a masterful four-minute long, without any cuts, wide-angle panning shot of Venice, California standing in for a seedy border town betwixt the U.S. and Mexico (which, pre-gentrification, it matched. It's also historic- half of what's depicted has been since destroyed,) all of which TOTALLY PROMOTES THE STORY. Wowza! Multiple orgasms in movie-making! Every shot's sheer composition is a frame-able winner. The film also stars some of the most popular, A-list actors of the 1950's (Heston, Leigh, Dietrich) alongside Welles' own lumbering misanthrope, ambiguous "Training Day"-worthy cop, and a pre-Robert Altman dialogue technique of people talking over one another's words occasionally, just like in real life. Ten star movie! Rent it ASAP! Even if you can only find the studio-bowdlerized version, it still stands up.