All's well that ends Welles

Yesterday, our CineVerse group was challenged to peel back the layers on Orson Welles' last Hollywood film, Touch of Evil, a movie that offers much more than what is seen by the naked eye. A summary of our group gab follows:

WHAT DO YOU FIND CURIOUS, ODD AND UNSETTLING ABOUT TOUCH OF EVIL?

• It’s a very stylized film with an exaggerated look and feel to it. The plot is fairly conventional and easy to follow, but the framing of the shots, lighting and visual design, camera movements, and editing style are very offbeat.
• Interesting casting choices: Heston as a Hispanic man, Mercedes McCambridge as a sexually ambiguous gang leader, Dennis Weaver as a sexually obsessed motel manager are all examples of quirky casting.
• A necessary but also deliberately cheap, tawdry and pulpy misc en scene and story: Welles essentially turns a trashy contemporary pulp novel into poetry here.
• The attack by the gang upon Vargas’ wife is disturbing for the late 1950s, suggesting a gang rape by a drug using gang—from which Mrs. Vargas strangely recovers quickly. This plays upon societal fears of the time, including fear of juvenile delinquency, marijuana use, and sexual threats to our women by minority no-gooders.
• The hyperbolic extent to which Welles isn’t afraid to depict himself as a morbidly obese, repulsive, sweaty and washed-up shell of a man. In essence, Welles is caricaturizing himself and commenting on how far he’s fallen from grace as a formerly hot property in Hollywood.

WELLES IS KNOWN AS AN INVENTIVE DIRECTOR WHEN IT COMES TO AUDIO AND VISUALS. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE INTERESTING TECHNIQUES HE USES TO CREATE MEMORABLE SHOTS AND SEQUENCES IN TOUCH OF EVIL?

• Long, uninterrupted takes, which require very careful planning, blocking, choreographing and technical prowess behind the camera, including: the famous 3-minute, 20-second-long continuous shot that opens the film; as well as the 5-minute-plus scene in the apartment of Lanniker’s daughter when Quinlan faces off with her and her boyfriend. These long shots create tension and a claustrophobic reaction from viewers, even on a subconscious level, who are waiting for a cut, reverse shot, close up or other edit point to relieve us of the spatial tightness and fixed visual concentration. By trapping characters together in the same shot for extreme lengths, the film insinuates that the fates of these characters are intertwined. These unbroken shots not only draw our attention because of their extreme length, but they proved to be an efficient way for Welles to shoot many scenes and stay under budget.
• High contrast, low-key lighting emblematic of film noir that employs heavy shadows.
• Crowded compositions and tight framing to add to the claustrophobic look and tone.
• Low-angled shots, often looking up at Quinlan, to suggest his malignant power and repugnant obesity
• Frequently moving camera, as evidenced by complex tracking shots, ambitious crane shots,
• Skip framing during zoom shots, which involves removing actual frames of film to exaggerate the effect of the zoom—such as the zoom in on the car explosion.
• Distorting lenses that make characters appear more grotesque or exaggerated and add a surreal quality to even ordinary objects, creating a sense of disorientation.
• Welles also employs an alternating baroque and gothic approach in many visuals, as film essayist Robert Cumbow states: “Baroque” in the way it uses incidental ornamentation within the frame composition, insisting upon signs, posters, souvenirs and bric-a-brac to provide comment on character and event, as well as to lend atmosphere. Bulky Quinlan, looking up quizzically, belatedly prepares his defense against the lanky Vargas, in a room walled with bullfight posters and photos of the great matadors. We almost expect him to snort and paw the earth. This mise en scene was, in part, Welles’s debt to Karl Freund, neo-Gothic cameraman (The Golem, 1920; The Last Laugh, 1924; Metropolis, 1926; All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930; Dracula, 1931) and director (Mad Love, 1935) who combined compositional richness with thematic darkness to create a Cinema of the Grotesque that seminally influenced the look and style of Citizen Kane (1941). Just as the milieux of Touch of Evil, the dark vaults of the police record depository, the “haunted” rooms of cheap motels and hotels, fit the Gothic tone that Welles adapted from Freund and other German film makers, its characters and relationships owe much to the archetypal model of the Gothic novel: the dark foreigner (Vargas), the fair lady victimized by evil (Susan), the imposing but secretive man of estate (Quinlan), the dark woman with supernatural connections (Tanya). The elements combine to chronicle the transformation of the Gothic into film noir—a path that Fritz Lang had also traveled.”

THIS FILM IS PARTICULARLY FAMOUS FOR ITS 3 MINUTE, 20 SECOND-LONG UNINTERRUPTED TAKE (THE OPENING SCENE). WHY DO YOU THINK WELLES CHOSE TO SHOOT THIS AS AN UNBROKEN, CAREFULY CHOREOGRAPHED SINGLE SHOT INSTEAD OF CHOPPING IT UP INTO SEVERAL SHOTS EDITED TOGETHER?

• If it were cut up, we wouldn’t know how long the bomb had been ticking or what length of time occurred between the car leaving the parking garage to arriving at the border.
• It establishes the geography of this border town and anchors in our minds how large, dirty and memorable the town is.
• It also ratchets up the tension and suspense, causing us to pay attention to the fact that not a single cut has occurred.

WHAT THEMES CAN YOU IDENTIFY THAT ARE EXPLORED IN THIS MOVIE?

• Racism: it’s the reason why Quinlan is so angry and deadest on manipulating this murder case—he is prejudiced against Vargas.
• Betrayal: Quinlan betrays the faith of his friend and vice versa
• Corruption and pollution: corruption of power, contamination of the town and its residents, the influence of corruption and drugs on youth (the biker gang)
• Ambiguity: not being aware of one’s guilt, innocence, prejudices, or even sexual orientation, as exemplified by the butch leader of the biker gang
• Ego and arrogance, which prove to be the undoing of Quinlan
• Social and cultural ugliness, as personified by the array of grotesque characters, from the nervous night man to the butch drug pusher to the seedy, balding gangster to Quinlan himself
• The evil inherent in every man, at any time—how the nature of evil is pervasive, even when you have good intentions, it can go awry and turn evil. The title of the film suggests that everything—even the best that man can offer—is capable of being touched by evil.

DOES TOUCH OF EVIL BRING TO MIND ANY OTHER FILMS?

• Robert Altman’s The Player, in that it also contains a bravura long, uninterrupted opening take
• Psycho, which also contains a scantily clad Janet Leigh in a fleabag motel room managed by a creepy night clerk
• The Searchers, which also features a lead character colored by his racial hate
• Many other films by Welles that showcase larger-than-life lead characters whose hubris destroys them, including Citizen Kane, Othello and Macbeth

OTHER FILMS DIRECTED BY ORSON WELLES

• Citizen Kane
• The Magnificent Ambersons
• The Stranger
• The Lady from Shanghai
•  A trio of Shakespeare adaptations: Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight
•  Mr. Arkadin
•  The Trial
• F for Fake