A meeting of major nations in Geneva decided that Vietnam should be divided in two. Under the protection of the United States of America, the peace loving democratic people could live productive lives in the south while the north would be left to Ho and his Communist hooligans. This was done, but Ho, provided with fully half of the country, was not so easily satisfied. He began this insurgency business, which had nothing to do with Surf or Rinso, but instead involved sending masses of infiltrators over the border pretending to be refugees from the north but in fact intent on destroying the peace and harmony of South Vietnam by murdering community leaders, disrupting communications and creating poverty by ruining crops. Perhaps there was some future for bodgies after all. Ho also sent guerrillas into the hills to attack by night, ambushing unguarded highways, blowing up bridges, massacring villagers who did not comply to their will. These guerrillas in the south were supplied from the north by a secret route through Laos called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and this the Viet Minh defended so aggressively that the US had been invited to assist the Laotians against this intrusion.
Thus the Vietnam war began by stealth in Laos, harmless and irrelevant it seemed, and no one could have guessed that before long its malignancy would reach out and touch us all.
Touch of Evil has been described as the greatest B movie ever made—a classic piece of film noir with outstanding Wellesian touches. Like all of the genre, it inhabits the shadowy world beneath the underbelly of life, a dirty, seedy place where the cops are more evil than the criminals.
Orson Welles had been hired as an actor by B producer Albert Zugsmith to play the hopelessly corrupt border town cop Quinlan, but star Charlton Heston threw his weight around and convinced them to let Welles direct. Orson promptly re-wrote the script and made the film his own.
The film opens with the famous longest tracking shot in history (exceeded several times since but never as impressively). You see a bomb placed in a car in the Mexican town and then follow the car through the streets until it passes Heston (as a Mexican cop, would you believe) and new wife (Janet Leigh) as they stroll through the border procedures and walk on, chatting in the aftermath of their honeymoon until, up ahead, the bomb goes off. All one long shot, 12 minutes duration and covering about a mile, and it is fabulous.
Recently the film had been restored, using a list of 58 changes asked for by Welles and denied at the time. Having seen both versions (thirty years apart admittedly), I struggled to notice the difference except that the titles were no longer imposed over the famous tracking shot. To be truthful, I found it no less impressive originally.
The action occupies a full day, from dawn to dawn, as Heston tries to investigate the bombing and is blocked by the massive frame of Quinlan—Welles made up to be monolithic. Dirty, rude, slobbish, reeking of his corruption and exhausted by it, Welles once more appears in a film gross and ugly, blundering about like an exhausted hippo on it’s hind legs.
We watch fascinated as Quinlan’s web of corruption unravels, tipped over the brink when Akim Tamiroff’s gang of thugs rape Janet Leigh. Quinlan is seen as utterly vile at first but as his world falls apart around him, Welles manages to force us to sympathise with him, such that his final demise is pure tragedy. Marlene Dietrich, as the local brothel-keeper and Quinlan’s last friend, (after he has shot his lap-dog deputy, played by opera singer Joseph Calleia) was really only in the film to speak the final ironic line—“He was some sort of man.”
In fact Heston has the line that sums it all up, when Quinlan languidly mutters of how tough a cop’s life is. “It has to be tough. The policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”
In the end, Quinlan is seen trying to wash the blood off his hands in the sewer-like, stygian river where he dies miserably.
It was Welles’ last American film.
