The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
Oscar nominated: best picture, original screenplay, sound
Listen for the use of SOUND in the film:
SPOKEN WORDS
--how/where does dialogue reveal “characters that say one thing when they feel and think something else”? (Phillips 167)
--voiceover narration (as in Memento)
SOUND EFFECTS (Phillips 168-171)
--to create a sense of location (opening scene)
--to support a mood (Harry’s state of mind in hotel scene)
--to conceal an action (conversation in the opening scene)
MUSIC
how/where does it “affect a scene’s mood and meaning? (Phillips 173)
“a musical motif may be played… to convey something about a character” (Phillips 174)
--in The Conversation, listen for
solo piano music
Harry’s playing saxophone
Music may be ON-SCREEN SOUND (Harry’s sax)
or OFF-SCREEN SOUND (solo piano. Or the orchestral score in Far From Heaven.)
SILENCE
Types of Sound Transitions (between shots or scene) (Philips 180-181)
--sound ends with a shot, then a new shot and new sound begin
--sound dissolve (sound from one scene fades out, sound from the next fades in)
--sound from one shot continues into the next shot
--sound for a second shot begins before the shot does
--sound used to connect multiple shots
(Leonard’s voiceover narration in the sequence when Sammy is taking the test)
Also see pp. 186-187 on sound in a scene from The Conversation.
LECTURE
Let’s look to see the role sound (and silence) plays in reinforcing meaning in several scenes from The Conversation.
PLAY ONE:
START of the film:
off screen sound which eventually proves to be music that the mime is performing to.
(high angle shot, behind credits (Megan Ratner in an article on the film points out that it’s almost as if the shot were taken from a bomber!) Then a slow zoom down (the filmmakers had the zoom on a machine that would insure that the zoom shot would take the exact amount of time to correspond to the portion conversation that was to be recorded by Caul and his men).
This is a long take (all one shot, no editing, 3:13 minutes, like the opening shot of Touch of Evil, which we’ll see next week, and which Coppola surely knew about and may have been modeling in this opening shot)
Note that the camera follows a street performer here—a mime! Ironic, given that this is a film that features sound at the center of its plot and a mime is a performer who uses silence. Also, consider on the plot level of the film that Harry is likely annoyed by this because the mime is drawing attention to him, the last thing that he would want in this situation when he is “undercover.”
sound effect: four times we get the distorted, electronic sound of the recording, which eventually makes us realize we’re hearing it through the eaves dropper’s equipment, thus the muffled, distorted nature of the sound
slowly the volume increases as we zoom closer
This leads to dolly/crane, extreme high angle long shot of Harry Caul (note pun on his name, “call”)
CUT 3:13: this is the first cut of the film.
Cut to the recording, so now we know more about what’s going on. It’s as if the establishing shot is a mystery, and the answers of what’s happening and why are being slowly revealed to us.
3:28 point of view shot, the subject of which is the two lovers in the crosshairs of the scope. Are they going to be shot? Is this a gun sight? We don’t know.
3:52: cut to close ups shot with a telephoto lens that flattens the image. We become very conscious of the sound and trying to hear the dialogue, most of which is indistinguishable.
camera tracks back and forth following various people, showing Harry in the mise en scene, and then finally tracks to follow lovers. It’s as if the camera itself is looking for something, or perhaps spying on someone, just as Harry and his men are spying (and perhaps we the viewers are spying, asking questions about these characters). NOTE THAT THIS IS THE FIRST DIALOGUE OF THE MOVIE. We also see the Frederic Forrest character, Harry’s assistant, walk through the mise en scene.
5:29 cut to interior of sound van, dialogue continues from one scene to the next = sound transition. This is perhaps the first time we fully understand what’s going on.
Cindy Williams’ lines of dialogue about the homeless man make her sound innocent sweet (and she was likely cast in the part because she has a sweet appearance and a sweet and innocent sounding voice—the same reason she was later cast in the sitcom Laverne and Shirley!). Hence we are likely to mis-read the situation surrounding the murder the same way Harry does, and we’re set up for the surprise ending. We think the couple will be the victims of murder, but in the end it’s revealed they themselves are the murderers.
6:00 swish pan to second sound man
distorted dialouge
STOP 6:19
START TWO (bookmark 1) HARRY’S APARTMENT
Chapter 2 9:18
first music soundtrack of the film. It’s solo piano (perhaps like Harry Caul is “solo” in his life, and through the film—isolated, distant, living in solitude). In fact, director Coppola testifies to this fact in the DVD commentary on the film, saying that he meant the piano to be a “lonely instrument,” just as Harry is lonely. Rattner aptly describes the piano music as being like “a child’s finger exercise.”
Note that thw piano music functions as bridge over three shots (with one dissolve) that otherwise would not be that interesting. It’sound which builds interest or even tension in these shots.
burglar alarm as second sound transition between two scenes, the hallway of Harry’s apartment building, and the interior of Harry’s apartment. Note what the many locks on his door depicted in the mise en scene tell us about Harry’s seemingly paranoid need for security, a fact which his ensuing conversation with his landlady underscores.
10:41 note here that the camera is stationary, while Harry moves. In contrast to the previous spying sequence when we had a restless, moving camera. Is this meant to indicate that Harry is hiding from us? Is secretive? And we the viewers are voyeurs, spying on him the way he spies on his subjects.
11:41 Harry on phone walks off frame, talking continues, camera pans left to pick him up (a kind of surveillance, which after all is what movies are). Harry walks off camera again, returns. Again, SOUND IS WHAT’S HOLDING THIS SCENE TOGETHER. Note too that this camera movement is repeated at the end of the film when Harry is playing his saxophone in his stripped apartment.
Dialogue: Note that Harry “has nothing personal, nothing of value.” His only concern is how the landlady got into his apartment. This dialogue reveals that Harry wants to be left alone, but also reveals something about Harry that he himself is not aware of, but that we become aware of—his loneliness, his paranoia. Or in the words of your text, in this situation Harry is “a character who says one thing when he feels and thinks something else”? (Phillips 167)
END HERE (about 12:00)
START THREE – FAST FORWARD TO 15:25 (bookmark 2) HARRY’S WORKSHOP
three tape recorders are depicted in the mise en scene, and we begin to fully understand what’s going on
(by the way, sound editor Walter Murch notes that a degree of technology that would allow Harry to piece together this conversation didn’t exist in 1974, nor does it exist today. The filmmakers granted Harry some poetic license in the screenplay. I have to say that it never occurred to me that this degree of surveillance would be impossible, but even if we had thought of that, the filmmakers think that it won’t distract us from the story or harm our willing suspension of disbelief.
no dialogue. instead a train whistle, squeaking of chair.
Harry plays clip of lovers talking again. three different tapes from three different sources, intercut with Harry mixing the sounds form the three sources. and also in an intercut we see the shopping bag that was referred to in the leader of the audio tape a few moments ago.
18:25 slow sound dissolve to music score, bus. –On your own, you can GO TO TEXBOOK PAGE 187 for a discussion of sound in this scene.
Note the existence her of sound bridges through music
20:20 STOP
BEGIN FOUR chapter 5 fast forward to HEADQUARTERS
about 32:24. (bookmark 3)
When Harry sees the girl from the tape, there is the too-loud sound of elevator, distorted conversation of bystanders: to approximate Harry’s mental state as he’s under pressure.
Then music comes in, more dissonant and tense than it has been in the film thus far.
A squeaking sound, volume rising…
which turns out to be sound transition to next scene of the audio tape fast forwarding.
33:10 END
BEGIN FIVE chapter ten rewind to (bookmark 4) HARRY’S DREAM
1:16:48 train sound. camera cranes back and up. dream sequence: tight close up out of focus. tape distortion. other orchestral sounds. Note that we learn more that’s personal about Harry from him in the dream than we do at any other point in the movie. He can’t talk about himself in his waking, conscious life, but in the dream he can reveal something: “I’m not afraid of death. I am afraid of murder,” he says. Thus we learn of the guilt that seizes Harry, due to his devout Catholic background and beliefs. train sounds. Harry imagines seeing murder.
Then Harry hears (and we hear) the train in “real life,” decrescendo.
Note dissolves rather than cuts in the editing in this scene. Note too the gong sounds and dark block piano chords
1:20:40 STOP
BEGIN SIX chapter 11 ff to (bookmark 5) ROOM 773
1:34:36: Harry taps room where Director faces his wife with the tape.
There is prolonged silence, the muffled sound of fight next door
Scream: comes from where? several jump cuts in this scene. piano chords in the sountrack. As the audience, we’re asking what’s real here and what’s Harry’s state of mind?? But that’s not really answered, is it? The film is a progression more and more into Harry’s state of mind and subjective apprehension of the world around him. And that information about Harry’s precarious state of mind is delivered to us primarily though sound. That’s appropriate given Harry’s occupation.
cut to black.
fade in. sound of tv, Flintstones cartoon, which Harry perhaps has turned up so he doesn’t have to hear what’s going on next door?? Is he trying to drown out sounds he’s hearing that exist only in his mind?? We don’t know for sure, and even at the end of the movie it’s not entirely explained.
stop here about 1:36:48
BEGIN SEVEN (bookmark 6) ROOM 773 continued
1:40:00 Note the use of silence in this scene. No evidence that the room has been even occupied. So was the argument and altercation only in his mind? Was it the result of his overwhelming sense of guilt at his actions?
Then the sound of toilet running, then blood spilling out of the toilet. So we know at this point that he’s delusional, possessed by guilt for what he’s done, and really for his entire life.
cut to black
fadein to Harry in front of partially demolished building. The dissonant, minor key solo piano music returns.
141:50 STOP
BEGIN EIGHT (bookmark 7):chapter 12 ff to 144:31 We hear the conversation one last time, this time revealing the “other version” of the murder—what truly happened.
It turns out that the lovers were using Harry to get the tape to the Director to set him up for their murder plot. We hear the line differently this time. Now it’s not “He’d KILL us if he had the chance,” but “He’d kill US if he had the chance.” So Harry was part of the set up. Walter Murch, the sound editor for the film, testifies that he did indeed record two different versions of the line, one which emphasizes KILL and another which emphasizes US. The filmmakers wanted to be sure that the viewer got the point about the ambiguity in that prhase, that it could be taken to mean either that the couple are victims, or the couple are perpetrators of a murder, depending on how you hear the line. So in a film about sound and silence and trying to understand what someone is saying through eavesdropping, this slight matter of emphasis is the point on which the entire plot turns. 1:45:50 END
[total about 27 minutes of clip time]
THEME:
For a brief comment on “meaning” in the movie I’m going to borrow from W. Russel Gray, who in a 1999 article in Journal of Popular Culture wrote,
As we approach its silver anniversary,
our most trenchant film about privacy invasion merits re-viewing. Released in
the last year of Richard Nixon's abbreviated term, The Conversation remains
relevant in another president's scandal beleaguered second term. As well as
being a modern morality tale, Francis Ford Coppola's film recounts a personal
tragedy stemming from obsession with technological success. Harry Caul achieves
ethical insight but too late for the eminent electronic eavesdropper to
influence the consequences of his amorality.
Ultimately, Harry's decent, heroic intentions are frustrated. The Conversation pointedly is not a mystery in which the investigator is able to solve his puzzle in time to bring evil-doers to justice. It is a tragedy for the age of technology; realization comes but too late for the protagonist to redeem his own evil conduct.
Touch of Evil (OrsonWelles, 1957) 110 minutes
TERMS
final cut – the last version of an edited film (Phillips)
long take – a shot of long duration
extreme long shot, long shot, medium shot,
medium close up, close up, extreme (tight) close up
wide angle, normal, telephoto lenses
deep focus cinematography
dolly shot, tracking shot, pan, tilt, crane, zoom,
hand held camera
high angle, low angle, eye level
point of view shot
dutch angle
hard lighting, soft lighting
low key lighting
backlighting
bottom lighting
side lighting
FILM NOIR -- see glossary, page 629. We’ll talk about genre in a few weeks.
noir stylistic characteristics
low key lighting. shadows
majority of scenes at night
urban settings
preference for vertical and diagonal lines over horizontal
obstructed frames (objects in the frame which block our view)
presence of mirrors, reflection in windows, staircases, Venetian blinds
noir narrative characteristics
femme fatale –sexually alluring female
a detective figure – he’s lured into an underworld of crime and darkness
a patriarchal figure – an evil, powerful male
characters motivated by selfishness, greed, cruelty, ambition, lust
characters willing to lie, double cross, kill
mood: embittered, depressed, cynical, fatalistic
plots: convoluted (ie, hard to figure out)
ping pong dialogue with sexual innuendo
TOUCH OF EVIL – Introduction
The techniques we’ll see exemplified in this film: Remember that in addition to being interesting for film buffs in and of themselves, the idea is that the use of these techniques underscores the meaning of the film. Film makes its points, has its effects, primarily, visually. The more you know about how a film is working on you visually, the more you’ll be able to enjoy and appreciate it.
[list techniques to be exemplified in the film—see overhead]
Touch of Evil was taken away form Welles by the studio and recut to their tastes. After seeing the studio version, Welles wrote a 58 page memo asking for changes to restore the film to his vision of it. They refused. In 1998 film historians recut the master of the film to comply with Welles requests. That is the version we’ll see tonight.
Touch of Evil was originally released as the second half of a double feature, a so called “B movie.” Hailed as a masterpiece in Europe, it was not a success in America. Welles, the greatest American film director ever, never again directed a Hollywood film after Touch of Evil. He was 42 years old.
FILM NOIR
Some argue that Film Noir isn’t a genre, but a style of filmmaking. Memento has aspects of noir narrative, though not shot in a noir style
Touch of Evil lecture
1. BEGIN :57 chapter 2
*first long take
tight close up of bomb in hand (so we don’t know who did it)
dolly shot follows as the man puts the bomb in car trunk, then crane up
dolly left, following car
dolly back to traffic cop (a shot that we get later when Vargas starts the fight in the bar, looking for his wife), we know the bomb is in the car, but the people, including the traffic cop, innocent people passing, etc., don’t know.
crane to extreme long shot with wide angle lens, which speeds up movement toward the camera.
crane to high angle shot and dolly in to Vargas and Susie,
tracking Vargas and Suzie, the first people we pay attention to.
(note the music coming from various dive night clubs. Welles was very insistent on this, wanting to give the flavor of a border town)
Vargas and Suzie catch up to bomb car
camera dollies back as they walk
they and car cross border
medium shot, deep focus shot (3:20—note arrangement within the mise en scene)
pan left to bomb car. we know the bomb is there. Woman in the car hears a “ticking noise”
dolly in on S an V to medium shot—the closest we’ve come to any characters so far
4:19 First cut in the film: It was a 3 minute and 19 second long take!
[pause]
Vargas and Suzie’s kiss is interrupted by the sound of the car bomb (significant, as the romance, sexual consummation of the marriage is to be constantly interrupted in the film by Vargas’ police duties. He leaves her alone in motel while he’s working on the case. He doesn’t seem to be interested in sex with this woman who appears as a 1950s “blond bombshell,” a “sweater girl” as they were sometimes called--sexually alluring. Then later Vargas can’t talk intimately with his wife on the phone as she’s in her teddy at the motel, because he’s calling from a borrowed phone and the odd looking blind woman is in the room, listening in!)
cut to zoom in shot of burning car
hand held camera (not as common in those pre-steadicam days). The feel here is much different from the smooth flow of the long take pre-blast. Jerky. Tension. Excitement. It’s a cinema verite, documentary feel, as if trying to replicate something that is really happening, rather than a Hollywood movie. The sound changes as well. people talking in two languages, no music, as Vargas runs to burning car. note low key lighting, deep shadows. harsh side lighting characteristic of most of the film
“This could be very bad for us” Vargas says. “for us?” Suzie asks. “for Mexico I mean”
So who are “we” here in Vargas’s eyes? the newly married couple, their interracial marriage?
or Mexcio? This picks up the theme of borders that runs through the film—borders between countries, between male and female, between what’s legal and illegal as we see later with Hank Quinlan’s police work.
END about 5:00
2. *BEGIN about 6:30 “lead on, Pancho)
Notice that even though Suzie is married to a Mexican, she uses this ethnic slur in addressing the hoodlum. It’s simply the racism of the day.
cross cutting: editing term we didn’t see two weeks ago in Memento when we studied editing. In these sequences, we cut back and forth from Suzie to Vargas, Suzie to Vargas, while the two events are happening simultaneously. Much of the film is edited this way. It’s something else Welles wanted but wasn’t allowed in the original cut of the film, when it was taken out of his hands before the final cut. .
7:10 low angle shot of the coroner, played by Joseph Cotton, people around Linaker’s body
7:49: first introduction to Hank Quinlan. he’s enormous. Note the assymetrical composition. low angle shot, side lighting, low key lighting
8:10 cross cut back to the Susie narrative (fast forward)
9:25 reflection shot: Grandi in the mirror talking to Suzie
9:37 symmetrical composition, that phallic long cigar that Grande is chewing on, visible in the mise en scene.
9:56 cross cut back to American side.
medium close up, medium, and close up shots of officials, DA, etc.
Quinlan and Vargas shot at low angle shots, while the other characters mostly at eye level shots. Notice the deep shadows from the low key lighting.
To me, this scene feels warm, humid, sweaty, confining—an effect created partly by the side lighting.
Note that even the smoke from the wreckage is casting shadows on the characters!
fast forward to…
11:23 cross cut back to Mexican side -- note that this is happening at the same time. 100 years ago, audiences new to film wouldn’t have understood what this cross cutting signified; now it’s become part of film language and we have no trouble with it.
3 13:17 (chapter 3)
film noir deep shadows, as we track the American cops into mexico—what is for them a world of danger, a “foreign” world-- looking for strip teasers. deep focus shots. Note Quinlan’s cane appearing in the mise en scene, important in the plot later.
(note subtly racist comments from Suzie, quinlan. suzie doesn’t speak any Spanish even though she married a mexican)
14:20 deep focus shot—good ones. using camera to tell a story as one of Grandi’s boys follows Vargas to throw acid at him. wide angle shot speeds up motion toward the camera.
15:07: after acid thrown at vargas. note the obstructed view in the mise en scene—so much junk between us and the action: a cart, pillars, etc. We can’t see clearly. There’confusion: a characteristic of the style of film noir.
1519: dolly shot down the bar, which will be repeated later when Vargas is back in the bar later in the filme demanding of the punks in Grande’s gang that they tell him what happened to Suzie
15:44 sounds of pianola. Note that Welles’ background in radio and thus he was very good at using sound in his films. The pianola and the theme it plays represent Hank Quinlan’s past with Tana, in his drinking days.
16:07 lovely obstructed shot with diagonal lines, leading to low angle, deeply shadowed, back lit shot of Quinlan as he’s drawn back, tempted back to his forbidden past when he’d hole up with Tanya and a case of whiskey for a week. As Hank walks toward the bordello, he walks almost completely into shadow.
tilt down, cut to interior, wide angle shot of interior, depth of field.
17:00 note softer, more even lighting around Tana (Marlene Dietrich) then around Quinland and the police and bad guys. This lighting is much kinder to her features.
END HERE
4. *BEGIN skip to chapter five, reverse, ten seconds
22:42 after bulb is broken: backlighting on Vargras
pan down to the hoodlum on the street
23:12: wide angle shot, note speeded up movement toward the camera
remember, by contrast, telephoto shot in the beginning of The Conversation, with the people milling back and forth in Union Square, how everyone appeared crowded into one plane.
END
5. skip to chapter six BEGIN
match cut from Grandi’s car, dissolve to Vargas’s car
*28:04 note back projection shot in car
Dialogue:
“one of the longest borders on earth is right here between your country and mine. An open border” “I would love being corny if only my husband would cooperate.” but husband is reluctant to have sex with his wife. in film noir iconography and narrative, the detective hero fears the femme fatale, fears the power she derives from her sexuality.
fast forward
*30:30 establishing shot, crane shot of desert landscape, to show how isolated Suzie is staying at the motel. “in the middle of nowhere” as Grande puts it. “she’s the only one staying here,” which of course proves to be important to the plot
END
6. BEGIN chapter 8 fast forward to 3824, light from the Venetian blinds, a film noir icon
“want me to call the motel, Vargas?” “later,” Vargas answers. Again, he’s not thinking about his new bride, about his wedding night, about the police business at hand.
fast forward to
*40:40 bottom lighting
41:40—fast forward to …
*42:05 deep focus cinematography allows for action in both foreground and background. Note quinlan’s cane, which is important later in the plot. And the blind woman listening in on Vargas’s call to his wife.
END
57:02 tight focus on drinks.
57:20 good deep focus shot: G on left, Q on right. “BAR” printed backwards on the window, in the middle of the mise en scene. Note that the background music is the same theme that we hear on the pianola in Tana’s bar.
5826: camera cranes up to a high angle shot to indicate Quinlan’s helplessness as he gives in to the temptation of alcohol. Dissolve to motel scene and more cross cutting.
END
8. BEGIN
skip ahead to chapter 13, then reverse slightly
*10930 another match cut of door closing in records office, door locked in suzie’s motel room
11000 shadow across suzie, as depicted in the text book, one of several such shots here, indicating that she is in danger, frightened.
fast forward?
11145 ominous silence after loud rock music after the night man shuts off the radio (also, note how this music is set up to contrast the music of the pianola music in previous scene at Tana’s. The two scenes are crosscut, and the music helps identify the difference, distinguishing and contrasting one scene from the other)
11149 fish eye effect wide angle lens shots in a close up, distorting the image of the hood as he’s about to attack Suzie (two of them)
11205 the scene ends with another match cut of doors (thus we get out of the scene the way we got in)
END
9. BEGIN. skip to chapter 14, fast forward
*12542: flashing light from the bar sign
sign on the door of the motel room: “did you forget anything” Ironic given that we later learn Quinlan left his cane at the murder scene, which is the evidence that will convince Quinlan’s assistant Menzies to work with Vargas against Quinlan
point of view shot. Suzie sees grande’s grotesque face
END
10. BEGIN skip to chapter 17, then reverse
14312 canted frames dutch angle
extreme low angle shot.
all the junk in the mise en scene near the river
11. *14615 and 14610 zoom in to speaker of recorder
note high angle and low angle shots
END 14619
visuals = 30 minutes
lecture on visuals = 25 minutes
wrap up = I hope you can see that it Welles’ mastery not only of cinematography, but of sound, mise en scene and editing—all the elements of film that we’ve studied so far—that makes him perhaps the greatest of American directors. I also hope that you’ll be able to identify and appreciate these film techniques, and how they’re used to make meaning in the films we see in class the rest of the term and films you see on your own.
I’ve also included in these notes on my website a review essay by David Walsh about Touch of Evil for you to look at before next week’s exam on Touch of Evil and The Conversation.
TOUCH OF EVIL – Introduction
The techniques we’ll see exemplified in this film: Remember that in addition to being interesting for film buffs in and of themselves, the idea is that the use of these techniques underscores the meaning of the film. Film makes its points, has its effects, primarily, visually. The more you know about how a film is working on you visually, the more you’ll be able to enjoy and appreciate it.
[list techniques]
Touch of Evil was taken away form Welles by studio and recut to their tastes. After seeing the studio version, Welles wrote a 58 page memo asking for changes to restore the film to his vision of it. They refused. In 1998 film historians recut the master of the film to comply with Welles requests. That is the version we’ll see tonight.
Touch of Evil was originally released as the second half of a double feature. Hailed as a masterpiece in Europe, it was not a success in America. Welles, the greatest American film director ever, never again directed a Hollywood film. He was 42 years old.
FILM NOIR
Some argue that Film Noir isn’t a genre, but a style of filmmaking. Memento has aspects of noir narrative, though not shot in a noir style
(note: paragraphs I read and projected in class are marked by an asterisk *)
Orson Welles directed the filming of Touch of Evil, his seventh feature, in early 1957. He got the assignment from Universal Studios in part due to the urging of the film's leading actor, Charlton Heston. It was Welles's first Hollywood film in a decade, and his only one of the 1950s. He had garnered a reputation for prodigality, for being difficult, for being "artistic." He brought in Touch of Evil, much of it filmed in the Los Angeles suburb of Venice, on schedule and on budget.
*During post-production, however, Welles and Universal executives had a falling out. The studio objected to the manner in which Welles, in his proposed version, had organized the various strands of the narrative. He began a scene, cut to another, returned and concluded the first scene, then cut to the last part of the second. Universal re-edited the film and added a few sequences, against Welles's wishes, to give it a smoother, more continuous feel and to "help" the exposition in certain spots. The director more or less disowned the version released in May 1958, which went virtually unnoticed in the US. It was Welles's last American picture.
*Based on a recently found 58-page memo, sent by Welles to studio executives at the time, efforts have been made to restore the film so that it conforms more closely to the director's conception. This new version of Touch of Evil, which restores much of the cross-cutting, is currently showing in movie theaters in the US.
The film, based on the pulp novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson, tells the story of an investigation into the death of a local big shot, Rudy Linnekar, killed by a bomb planted in the trunk of his car, in a seedy American town on the Mexican border. A Mexican narcotics investigator, Miguel "Mike" Vargas (Heston), honeymooning with his wife Susan, (Janet Leigh), becomes involved because he happens to witness the explosion. Meanwhile the couple faces threats and violence because Heston's character is in the midst of prosecuting a drug case against a crime family, the Grandis, that operates on both sides of the border.
Vargas, an honest man, comes up against the efforts of a policeman on the American side, Hank Quinlan (Welles), to railroad the Mexican son-in-law of the murdered man. Infuriated and threatened by Vargas, Quinlan joins forces with "Uncle Joe" Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) to discredit the Mexican official by framing his wife on drug charges and accusing them both of being drug addicts. The scheme unravels primarily because Quinlan's trusted assistant, Sgt. Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia), becomes disgusted with the methods of his longtime friend and mentor.
*Touch of Evil is justly famous for a number of things. First of all, its opening crane shot, lasting several minutes, which follows both the convertible carrying the time bomb and the married pair as they all proceed toward the US border on the Mexican side. Following their progress, the camera reveals a tawdry, impoverished town. At the border checkpoint the newlyweds are waved through after a few routine questions. The blonde woman in the convertible, the rich man's mistress, anxiously tells the border guards and her companion, "I've got this ticking noise in my head." What a line! As the camera returns to Heston and Leigh, who embrace, the bomb explodes. Welles accomplishes more in one shot than most directors do in two hours.
*The shot is more than a technical tour de force. The use of one extended take, which visually unifies so many elements, suggests a single, indivisible universe and it is a universe in which a layer of corruption coats virtually everyone and everything.
*Touch of Evil is also famed for its look. Critic Manny Farber noted: "Welles's storm tunnel has always the sense of a black prankster in control of the melodrama, using a low-angle camera, quack types as repulsive as Fellini's, and high-contrast night light to create a dank, shadowy, nightmare space." Farber described Calleia's Menzies, "scared out of his wits ... a grey little bureaucrat fitted perfectly into Touch of Evil with the sinister lighting and tilted scenes in which he's found, buglike at the end of hallways and rooms."
There are the acting performances. Even the often wooden Heston is good in this film; Leigh, Welles himself, Calleia; Ray Collins as the opportunist district attorney; Joseph Cotten as an aging police official; Tamiroff, chewing up the scenery with his ridiculous toupee; Dennis Weaver as a nervous, twitching motel clerk fascinated and terrified by Leigh's presence; Mort Mills as Schwartz, the only American who helps Vargas out; Mercedes McCambridge (out of Johnny Guitar) as a lesbian gang leader who says, "Let me stay. I wanna watch," as Leigh is held down on a motel bed and seems threatened with a gang rape; and, of course, Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich, whom Welles called up one night out of the blue and asked to come work on his film the next day, is Quinlan's old flame, a brothel keeper and fortune-teller of some vague description.
She gets to comment on Quinlan when the policeman shows up at her door, perhaps echoing some in Hollywood who hadn't seen Welles in person--the once-dashing actor-director who now weighed nearly 300 pounds--in nearly a decade. "I didn't recognize you. You should lay off those candy bars.... You're a mess, honey." Later she proclaims his imminent doom when he asks her to read his fortune: "You haven't got any.... Your future is all used up." And she gets the final word, as Quinlan lays dying in a dirty, polluted canal: "He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?"
*Touch of Evil is about racism and American chauvinism, and the haves and have-nots. Within the film's universe there are two "interracial" marriages: Leigh and her Mexican husband, Linnekar's daughter and hers; the latter marriage also crosses class barriers. Both unions are commented on. The border guards are surprised to discover this white woman married to a Mexican man, even a prominent one. When she is pointed out to Quinlan as Vargas's wife, he comments nastily, "She don't look Mexican either." During the interrogation of Sanchez (Victor Millan), the husband of Linnekar's daughter, Quinlan observes that he doubts the slain man wanted to have a "Mexican shoe clerk for a son-in-law."
*Although she's married to Vargas, Susan is capable of sneering at Mexico and Mexicans. When she's accosted by a young man in the street, unbeknownst to her one of the Grandi gang, she disdainfully calls him "Pancho." Later Uncle Joe asks her why she called his nephew Pancho. She doesn't know. "Just for laughs, I guess," is the best she can do.
*The film is also about the police, police corruption, police terror and the abuse of power. This film was made, after all, in the wake of the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Welles was never blacklisted, but he might as well have been. (He certainly was denounced as a Communist sympathizer by the Hearst press.) It can't be considered an accident that he didn't direct a film in the US between 1947 and 1957. His ideas weren't welcome and he didn't feel comfortable in the atmosphere that prevailed. By 1957 the civil rights movement had begun in earnest; Quinlan, from a certain point of view, fits one's picture of a Southern redneck sheriff.
Vargas stands up to Welles's character, who has "solved" the case by planting dynamite in Sanchez' apartment. They later have this exchange:
Quinlan: Our friend Vargas has some very special ideas about police procedure. He seems to think it don't matter whether killers hang or not so long as we obey the fine print.
Vargas: Captain, I don't think a policeman should work like a dog catcher in putting criminals behind bars. No! In any free country, a policeman is supposed to enforce the law, and the law protects the guilty as well as the innocent.
Quinlan: Our job is tough enough.
Vargas: It's supposed to be. A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.
*Touch of Evil is about sex, sexual fear and frustration, impotence, voyeurism, exhibitionism. Poor Janet Leigh, a blonde goddess, is peered at, leered at, spied on, drugged, stripped and violated metaphorically on a number of occasions. Sexuality is associated with a bombing, a strangling, a mock gang rape. But then no sexual relationship is ever consummated in the film. Every time Heston and Leigh start to kiss, they're disturbed. Even their intimate conversations on the phone are interrupted, usually by Vargas's being called off to duty. Repression--what doesn't take place, what isn't allowed, what isn't completed--dominates.
*Both married couples, in fact, are separated the entire film. For their part Linnekar and his stripper girlfriend are blown up in the first scene. No one has a mate. Quinlan's wife has been murdered years before; Dietrich has no use for him. He has aged badly and is so overweight. She casts doubt on his sexual capability. He suggests, "Well, when this case is over, I'll come around some night and sample some of your chili." She says drily, "Better be careful. Maybe too hot for you." The strongest feelings are expressed by Menzies for Quinlan. When Dietrich is asked, at the end, if she liked Quinlan, she replies: "The cop did. The one who killed him. He loved him."
Much of the film's power comes from the complicated relationship of Welles to his character. The director/actor explicitly denied any such complexity: "It's a mistake to think I approve of Quinlan at all. To me he's hateful; there is no ambiguity in his character. He's more than a little ordinary cop, but that does not stop him being hateful." The film's images suggest a less simple reality.
A purely sociological reading of Touch of Evil, or any serious work, will never prove satisfying. There is far from a one-to-one relationship between the nightmarish world of the film and American social reality of the 1950s, although clearly the former speaks to and illuminates the latter in significant ways. A spectator content simply to ask him- or herself, "Are these accurate portrayals of cops, politicians and hoodlums, or of the relations between them, or of the milieus they inhabit?," will derive something from the film, but he or she will avoid its richest and most suggestive ingredients. Touch of Evil, looked at closely, includes virtually nothing "realistic." The somewhat banal story grasps at certain essential qualities of immediate reality, but if the film did not represent a relatively autonomous intellectual and moral arena in which Welles worked at the themes and problems that obsessed him from an early age, it would have little enduring value.
Farber identified Welles's "career-long theme," and this is something of a commonplace, as "the corruption of the not-so-innocent Everyman through wealth and power." Complementing this, Andrew Sarris has observed that "every Welles film is designed around the massive presence of the artist as autobiographer. Call him Hearst or Falstaff, Macbeth or Othello, Quinlan or Arkadin, he is always at least partly himself, ironic, bombastic, pathetic, and, above all, presumptuous."
These points are no doubt true, but I think they miss something essential. If Welles were simply an egoist who despised corruption, even one with a remarkable flair for drama, I'm not certain his film work would continue to resonate as it does. Exposés of police misdeeds are not uncommon, even in contemporary American cinema. The quantity of evildoing by cops recounted in L.A. Confidential, a shallow and forgettable work, far outdoes anything in Touch of Evil. And it is not even the sense that corruption is all-pervasive that distinguishes Welles's films. On the contrary, many modern films paint a far bleaker picture.
To a certain extent this is the point. Welles, it seems to me, brings out both the necessity of corruption, its inevitability given the nature of contemporary society, and at the same time, its non-necessity. (People are touched by evil and corruption, it is not something essential to their being.) He is fascinated above all by the human personality and its almost infinite capacities. His concern with his own personality, although not untouched by self-aggrandizement, is of a relatively objective character. He studies himself, his responses to people and events, his progress, even his own degeneration, as a scientist-artist-autobiographer, and presents his results in the form of the characters he creates.
I think Welles, like an Oscar Wilde, was not so much enamored of his own powers, as he was deeply concerned by the problem of engendering such powers in others, so that the general public could "make itself artistic." There is a deeply democratic streak in his work. He believed that everyone could feel what he felt, see what he saw. (His efforts to produce classic works in an innovative style for mass audiences in the late 1930s provide an obvious reference point.) And he knew or intuited enough about life to understand that what prevented people from living as they could was fundamentally social in character.
The affinity for Shakespeare, which Welles felt from boyhood (his first reading primer was A Midsummer's Night Dream), was natural. Here were the world-historical, monumental individuals, some tormented, others grotesque, in whom he found the confirmation of his own feelings about himself and others. Figures not "larger than life," as they are often rather thoughtlessly described, but the norm, at least potentially, in a future in which the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx, and beyond.
But that is the future. In the present, personality presents a problem. I think Welles was deeply disturbed and intrigued by the degree to which breadth of personality tends to be bound up in the present social order with corruption and moral depravity. So many of his works seem to involve a tragic acceptance that one can't be grand and ambitious in this world without doing evil.
"The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life--the greater is the store of your estranged being." This is Marx on Welles's characters, or it might as well have been. For all of his protagonists--Kane, Arkadin, Quinlan--the piling up of success or power at one pole inevitably involves a psychic and sexual shriveling up at the other.
Welles is not moralizing. It's the human cost, the waste that drives him crazy. It's the disproportion between the capacities of his heroes and the pettiness of their actual pursuits and accomplishments--accumulating money, power, fame--that wounds him to the quick.
(If we think of his work as semi-autobiographical, there seems to be an element of harsh self-evaluation in this. Aren't we being encouraged, in his later films, to think of Welles as an artist who was seduced by the film industry, who squandered his talents, who completed only a fraction of the work he set out to do? Whether this self-criticism is entirely just is another question.)
This discrepancy holds true for Quinlan, the corrupt small-town policeman, too. His entrance is prepared, like Henry V's. We hear about him before we see him. He is legendary, "our local police celebrity." His car tears up to the scene of the crime. We first view him from below as he struggles to pull himself out of the back seat. He immediately exhibits his intuitive genius. He is a great detective. (The man he tries to frame up proves to be guilty.) More than that, he dominates every scene. Vargas is upright, but he never has the impact of Quinlan. Half the time Vargas runs around like a chicken with its head cut off. He neglects his wife and places her in danger. He pursues Quinlan, but without the help of Menzies (who says, "I am what I am because of him [Quinlan]"), he never would have exposed the detective.
And yet Quinlan is filthy, a monster, a murderer. Welles has made himself toad-like, bloated, malevolent. But, even so, his end is tragic. People shouldn't become what he becomes, or die like he dies, a big, fat ridiculous animal floating away in a pool of dark, oily, garbage-filled water. To make such a horrible man a tragic figure and to make an audience feel his tragedy, without sentimentality, even as it despises him, is the mark of a great artist.