The Eyes of Hank Quinlan--Touch of Evil, 1958

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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?

Comments

[Charles]

Based on your recommendation, I just watched a recently released 1080p version of the "restored" cut. You might be surprised at the increase in tonality in a really good BluRay HiDef transfer, the film is much less contrasty black and white than other Noir films. But I was a bit surprised, it is obvious the recut film had some editing problems, it just isn't immaculately tight like a Welles film should be. Still, it's a pretty great Noir classic. But it just makes me wonder what it COULD have been.

[John F. Ptak]

Well, the thing is a great achievement given all that had gone wrong with the production/editing end. (Not only was the editing taken over by Universal, but some of the film was actually reshot.) Yes there's some goofy stuff in it, but you just have to look over its shoulder a little to get on with the rest of the film.