JF Science Books Quick Post
Hank Quinlan: Come on, read my future for me.
Tanya: You haven’t got any.
Hank Quinlan: What do you mean?
Tanya: Your future is all used up. –from Touch of Evil, 1958 (Hank was played by Orson Welles; Tanya, his once-upon-a-time squeeze, by Marlene Dietrich.)
This has been one of my all-time favorite films, though I don’t want to actually see the thing too often. It is sharp as glass, with hardly any grays in sight, mostly oblique black and white, giving the film a very “removed” feeling, cold, isolating. Orson of course is a magnificent beast, the enormous shell of a spent bully with virtually nothing left to move around except for his undulating fat and a sliver of power, wielding that jiggly memory with eyeballs so puffy and dead that I do not know to this day how he achieved that pus-y look. His entrance into the film is remarkable–big black car door opens, and the gigantic Orson pulls himself out, his pig-bristle slough-eyed face way too close to the camera for comfort.
It is an odd movie, but just about every still you see from the thing is like a stand-apart photograph, a movie composed of 55,000 individual images.
The screenplay was written by Welles, though it may have been influenced by a novel by Whit Masterson (actually a pseudonym for another pseudonym, Wade Miller, which was the entity of Robert Wade and William Miller, which is entirely too much rigorous hidenness for such a modest effort) called Badge of Evil (1956). This doesn’t matter; the whole deal about the film is the brain behind the staging and filming, which belonged of course to Mr. Welles.
All I really wanted to do with this piece today was post a variety of Touch of Evil movie posters. Here they are:
This isn’t the entrance I was talking about–can’t find it–but this view of Orson is pretty good (comes at about 3:30):
Schwartz: Well, Hank was a great detective all right.
Tanya: And a lousy cop.
Schwartz: Is that all you have to say for him?
Tanya: He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?