If you find yourself shouting at the performers when you see some of the decisions they make, the movie has you totally engrossed.

In 1957, Orson Welles returned from a 10-year long self-imposed exile in Europe to make what would be the last of his Hollywood feature films, Touch of Evil. In Hollywood, he had always been treated as the boy genius in want of a proper comeuppance. And, as a consequence, Welles only ever succeeded in making one film--his first, Citizen Kane--that was not, at some point, sequestered by the studio for re-editing and the insertion of additional over-explicating re-shoots by studio hacks. These hacks functioned rather like the staff painters at the Vatican who defaced Michelangelo's Last Judgement, covering the genitalia of the damned, lest someone forget the actual intent of this great mortal lesson on the flesh. In any case, the studio got a look at the then largely unedited version of the film while Welles was off appearing on the Steve Allen show in New York. They were predictably horrified at the innovative editing, camera and sound work on what the studio had hoped would be a standard B movie, and so, instantly banned Welles from the editing room and hired, somewhat on cue, a hack to shoot and re-shoot bits of the film. Welles was invited to watch the screening of the final version after which he left angry and--some say--in tears. Amazingly, he went directly home, sat down at his typewriter and composed a 58-page letter that outlined how he had intended the film to play. The letter was lost but resurfaced in 1992, inspiring editor and director Walter Murch to undertake a re-editing of the movie in compliance with the specifications and suggestions in the letter. The new version was released in theaters in 1999, incorporating some 50 changes and is now available in the new deluxe DVD edition.

For cinemaphiles, Touch of Evil has, perhaps, the finest of all opening sequences. It opens with a close-up of a bomb, which is set to go off in 3 minutes and twenty seconds, the very length, incidentally, of this uncut crane and tracking shot. The camera pulls back, turns, lifts and falls--only to do more of the same until the explosion. In the process, we are introduced to Miguel Vargas, a Mexican detective, and his new wife, Susan. As they wander down the street and across the border, heading for their hotel, they repeatedly cross paths with the car and its ticking contents. The car explodes and the pot is stirred. To the surface comes Hank Quinlan. He's been the sheriff of Los Robles for some thirty years and is treated by locals as a hard but honest enforcer. After thirty years, however, he appears to have swallowed and grown fat with all the city's sins and ambles sweatingly about as a kind of ailing, lame king figure, awaiting the inevitable, younger usurper. And for Quinlan, that would be Miguel Vargas, whose foreign and, perhaps, conflicting celebrity seems a pointed threat. Their conflict, as they attempt to find the bomber, is intercut with scenes tracking Susan's course on that same night and the next day.

In Welles original version, these three stories--Miguel's, Quinlans's and Susan's--were of near equal weight, the narrative moving back and forth between them in more or less equally long sequences of 3 minutes. The studio, however, feared for the lesser intelligence of the American public and so, recut the film into longer, more conventional narrative units of some 10 and 15 minutes each, with the subsequent effect of fully subordinating Susan's abduction and torture to Miguel's quest to expose Quinlan's corruption. Editor Walter Murch has attempted, in this latest version, to restore something of the original frenetic cross-cutting but was hampered by what was swept away from the editing floor many, many years ago and having--even in one instance--to retain an uninspired 10-minute re-shoot by a studio hack for the sake narrative continuity.

And such was the fate of all previous work that Welles had done for Hollywood--with the miraculous exception of Citizen Cane. Incidentally, Citizen Cane is now commonly considered the first film noir, usurping the title once carried by The Maltese Falcon, released that same year--1941. In it, audiences were introduced to all the themes and stylistic elements that would come to be associated with this favorite film genre--the only genre, if you think about it, in which Welles ever really worked and the genre for which he provided not only the seminal seed, in Citizen Cane, but also the so-called "baroque tombstone" in Touch of Evil. Both films involve a fallen, defeated hero of sorts whose story is only half gathered from a broken, distorted narrative. And while there are very few stylistic elements that they don't share, Touch of Evil is the more fearsomely frenetic. There is that famous opening shot, followed by what must have been the first running hand held shot in a studio fiction. The story is broken into pieces that are presented in a kind of perpetually careening criss-cross in which the principles meet and separate, clash and rebound over and over and over again. It meets--as best as contemporary material can--the criteria for Greek tragedy and would appear to be aiming, somewhat, at the greatest example of that genre--Oedipus Rex. Hank Quinlan is almost always found amongst a group of admirers, hangers-on and indebted politicos who circle him constantly amidst all the visual whirl, acting as a kind of flunky chorus, singing the praises of his past, yipping at his now mean focus on the present crime, looking for a future without him. Quinlan is the creature that metamorphosed into the three-legged version of itself in the evening of its life. He still towers against the sets but struggles to lift his feet from the ground, to sway somewhere, to breathe--engaged in the nightmarish futility of trying to walk forward without ever really advancing. He is grown large, sweaty, ailing, wandering the town on his cane--a symbol of his erupting weakness, his tragic flaw. After 30 years, he oversteps. Quinlan had never taken any money, as many would have, but he planted evidence. And rationalizes it by telling himself, and his partner, "I never framed anybody--unless they guilty." But Quinlan's very presence in the town is a sin for which no one is quite sober in mind, spirit or soul. Results are made--and made to fit a world that is all slightly askew. Facts are manufactured and then set at weird angles in the vain, psychotic hope that everything will look natural if everything is made to look equally unnatural through the same corrupting lens. And in the end, Quinlan, the planter of evidence, unwittingly plants evidence against himself.

It's a movie that gives you a feeling of satisfaction after you've watched it. The cast is A+ and the acting is just as good, especially the classic performances from Charleston Heston and Orson Welles. If you like a good mystery then you should check this out. You won't be sorry.

This is another example of a studio taking the lazy road. This brilliant film has been cropped for the DVD version. Isn't it nice how cropping works. It gives the studio a chance to get people to buy the title again if they fix it, which they won't. They'll probably release a Special Edition Version, but it probably won't be fixed. For a good review about this cropping of TOUCH OF EVIL read BERKLEY GUY's review. Me I'm too upset. I am sick of cropped DVDs. I'm sick of version after version. It is all a scam and we buy into it every time. I guess Criterion really is the only company that should be doing DVDs.