For me this movie is about the visuals, and everything from camera angles to the crane shot at the beginning are just a work of art.
It is a very gritty, and depressing plot, and being an older movie the paces is slower, but I love it so much, I have both versions of the movie.
Welcome to the wonderful world of film noir. 
What’s remarkable and rare about the Welles character and performance is that he is without “glamour/glamor” or “charm” in the usual Hollywood sense.
It’s almost too easy in film generally to make an unpleasant character actually quite likeable/glamorous or at least palatable or evoking some easy sympathy.
He’s so uncomfortable to watch it’s visceral. He probably has bad breath too. Certainly the film is dark and claustrophobic.
Are you sure? Did you forget something?
You tell me . It’s ages since I saw the film.
Then you need to watch it again, or you will be done in by your own touch of evil.
:rolleyes:
What? I agree with everything you said visually, but storywise-- Touch of Evil is a genre film. There’s really nothing that special going on there. Kane is the greatest story Hollywood ever told.
I guess I can kind of see where you’re coming from if you watched them both once, passively. But go back and watch CK a couple more times. It’s so much deeper and more rewarding. ToE really is not even in the same league. Not even close.
I’ve seen both films many, many times, and all but passively at that. I’ve never been able to connect emotionally with Kane, whereas Quinlan just struck a chord with me from the first time I watched ToE. I agree that CK has some better emotional scenes than ToE (the one where one of the characters tells a story about a girl he only met once, fleetingly, is fantastic) but to me, ToE is much more the story of the moral decline of a man, even if the scope is more limited. In fact, maybe it’s precisely the limited scope that glues ToE together better IMO. And even conceding that CK is deeper and more rewarding, the “genre” type story of ToE is still more likely to interest a casual viewer (as you said) who isn’t interested in the visual impact, which was why I compared the stories in the first place.