some kind of man
by Douglas Messerli
Orson Welles, Paul
Monash and Franklin Coen (based on a novel by Whit Masterson), Orson Welles
(director) Touch of Evil / 1958
Reviewing the 1998 restored version of Welles' underrated film, Touch of Evil, the other day, I was struck by how strangely prescient this film was concerning border relations between the US and Mexico. The hero of this work, Ramon Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston), is set to testify against a Mexican drug lord in Mexico City, his life threatened by members of Grande's large family for his actions. The local US authorities, not at all sympathetic to Mexican issues, are satisfied to be arresting Mexican citizens by planting evidence. Although the film seems to be taking place in border towns in Texas it might as well have been in contemporary Arizona, with a Sherriff like Paul Babeu at the helm. The US authorities want to believe in the heroism of Welles' "mess" of a human-being—as his former lover, Tana (Marlene Dietrich) describes him—detective Hank Quinlan, more than they desire truth, whatever that may be.
The incident that sets off the series of
dark events of Touch of Evil is a
border bombing of a local American business leader, who has been partying with
a whore on the Mexican side of the border, and whose car blows up as he moves
to the American side. Walking alongside of that car is a newly married couple,
the Mexican Vargas and his American-born wife, Susan (Janet Leigh), as they
move among the various honky-tonk establishments, each blaring out various
mambos, rock and roll, and jazz music, the effect of which Welles demanded was
necessary to establish the tone of his film. At the border crossing each
couple, the walking pair and the car-bound couple are briefly stopped and
checked before the explosion sets the movie into motion.
Vargas: This could be
very bad for us.
Susan: For us?
Vargas: For Mexico, I
mean.
The "us" of his statement is
revelatory, for Vargas is a man of international repute, a man who one might
describe as caring more for his causes than for the cause of love. Indeed,
studio execs complained to Welles and changed some of his scenes on account of
what they saw as the unbelievability of Vargas' quick abandonment of his
brand-new wife for the chase of the murderer. In a 58-page memorandum,
outlining his disagreement with their reediting of his film—a problem Wells
would face on nearly every one of his movies—the director explained Vargas'
character this way:
A honeymoon couple,
desperately in love, is abruptly
separated by a
violent incident (the bombing of the car) -
an incident which,
although it had no personal bearing on
either one of them,
the man considers as a matter of his
urgent professional
concern. This feeling of responsibility
by Vargas is, of
course, an expression of the basic theme
of the whole picture;
further, his wife [stet] resistance to such
masculine idealism,
her failure, and even refusal to understand,
is human and very
feminine reaction which any audience can
grasp easily and
sympathize with. She is, after all, in a foreign
country and has been
subjected to a series of indignities which
irritate and bewilder
her, and which her husband fails to
completely
appreciate. Vargas' behavior and her reaction, make
it necessary to
dramatize and underline this temporary misunder-
standing between them. By minimizing
it; by sweetening their
relationship at the
wrong moment, and warming it up at precisely
where the distance
separating the man and woman should be at
its greatest, there
is a sharp loss in dimension, and both Vargas
and Susan emerge as
stock characters - the sort of routine
"romantic
leads" to be found in any programme picture.
Surely we might agree with Welles
assessment of his script, but it does pose a problem, again and again, since
Vargas' near total abandonment of her and her susceptibility to the local
Grande's threats makes if difficult, at times, to comprehend the characters.
When Vargas allows her to travel to an isolated hotel, empty in this off-season
period, without even checking upon who owns the place (Joe Grande himself), we
even wonder about his ability as a detective. Yet it is these very tensions,
Vargas' determination to follow along with the corrupt Quinlin even though he
has no authority to participate in the investigation, and Susan's feisty but
ineffective battles with Grande's malicious young boys and girls that creates
the marvelous tensions of the film.
Both Vargas and his wife are swept up in
the corrupt American battles that presume guilt and rely on bigotry and hate.
Vargas, discovering an empty shoebox in the apartment of the bombing suspect
Manolo Sanchez, is shocked when detectives soon after discover two sticks of
dynamite in the same box. Determined to out Quinlin's chicanery, he
investigates the American detective's chicken ranch to discover that he has
purchased ten sticks of dynamite, two of which are now missing and, after
investigating former cases, discovers that in almost all of Quinlin's
investigations evidence was found on site that the criminals declared to have
been planted.
To fight back, Quinlin joins forces with
the evil Joe Grande to torture Susan and link her—and ultimately Vargas—to
drugs. In a kind a terrifying dry-run of Hitchcock's Psycho of a few years later, Janet Leigh as Susan must endure a
horrifying attack in an isolated motel, where she is shot up with sodium
pentothal (pretending to be a potent drug) and—after being transported back to
town—is involved in what appears to be the murder of Grande, an act committed
by Quinlan himself in a kind a mad revenge against both Vargas and the long-ago
strangler of his own wife.
As Tana arrives at the scene, she asks
"Isn't somebody gonna come and take him away?"
The interchange between Tana and Schwartz
is one that has always intrigued me:
Schwartz: ....You really
liked him didn't you?
Tana: The cop did...the
one who killed him...he loved him.
Schwartz: Well, Hank was a
great detective all right.
Tana: And a lousy cop.
Schwartz: Is that all you
have to say from him?
Tana: He was some kind of
man... What does it matter what
you say about
people?
For years, I interpreted that line,
"He was some kind of man," as suggesting that despite Quinlin's evil
failures that he was special, a kind of incredible man. But, for the first
time, in seeing this film yesterday, I realized that Tana was not speaking of
him as a special being, as a kind of magical "saint" who so many,
particularly Menzies perceived him to be, but simply recognizing that he was a
failed human being—not a perverse Santa, but a man, a man without a future. It
no longer matters what you say about the dead.
*If the character of
Menzies is in love with Welles’ character, in real life Welles himself
expressed his love and admiration for the actor, Joseph Calleia. Welles
observed:
"What an
actor—Joseph Calleia. I fell in love with him as a ten-year-old boy. I saw him
in a play in New York ... a very well-staged melodrama which was an enormous
hit for about a year—it was made as a movie later with somebody else. He had
the leading role, and I never forgot him. And through the years I'd seen him in
movies—little things. And I could never forget that performance of his. He's
always played very stereotyped parts in pictures but is one of the best actors
I've ever known. I have such respect for him. You play next to him and you just
feel the thing that you do with a big actor—this dynamo going on.”
Los Angeles, August 30, 2012
Reprinted World Cinema Review (August 2012).
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