A Film Canon

Even in its restored version, the ingenuity of Touch Of Evil lies primarily in Welles' ability to strike a compromise between his baroque aestheticism and the pedestrian demands of a B-picture. On the one hand, he finds the perfect pretext for his fluid cinematography in the elastic, abstracted, hallucinatory parameters of the US-Mexican borderland, opening with a three and a half minute tracking shot, and following with a variety of extended takes, as well as a lurid, neon jazzscape whose menacing, windy ambience gradually segues out of the diegesis to choreograph the most pivotal, brutal sequence. On the other hand, the stilted talkiness endemic to the B-picture - here enhanced by several unconvincing performances, most notably Charlton Heston's as Mexican policeman Ramon Vargas - is offset by a subsidiary, ambient proliferation of ethnically and sexually ambiguous voices and, more strikingly, used as the pretext for Welles' most radical detachment of body and voice to date, as the 'horseless carriages' of The Magnificent Ambersons morph into the playerless pianola that punctuates the narrative, and the genius of Welles' own delivery, as corrupt US policeman Hank Quinlan, is clarified in terms of his radical, or perhaps merely directorial, alienation from that delivery - an alienation that is only explicated by the astonishing final sequence, in which, trailed and bugged by Vargas, Quinlan hears his voice emerging from the recording device, and speaks back to Vargas - and himself - through it.