I watched Touch Of Evil directed by Orson Welles in 1958. He also appears in the film as a corrupt police captain. It’s a gritty film-noir tale involving an upright Mexican police officer, improbably played by Charlton Heston, whose American wife ends up getting framed for the murder of a Mexican drug lord. It all takes place on both sides of the border, presumably around Tijuana though that’s not specified. Venice, CA. stands in for the Mexican border town; I’m told the famous arcades were much longer in 1958. Almost throughout the film there’s a rock’n’roll/blues sound track, sometimes as actual background music in bar scenes, but at other points it’s just incidental music, and it’s astonishing that the man behind this was Henry Mancini.
At some point along the way, Charlton Heston’s wife gets kidnapped and drugged, and here’s the interesting part. As she lies in the hotel room where she’s been dumped, coming out from under the influence of the drug (presumably heroin) with which she was injected, you hear rock music in the background. IN this case the music seems to be “real”, emanating from a bar or nightclub in the vicinity. But it’s definitely not Elvis or even Chuck Berry, or anything you would expect from 1958. Instead, it’s dreamy and “spacey”, reminiscent of early psychedelic rock from '65-'66. I feel sure that the music was intended to describe the sensations of being under the influence; how accurate that is with regard to heroin I have no idea, but that doesn’t really matter. At any rate, the whole thing was fascinating, and I just wanted to share.
Pepper Mill and I were watching this last night, but we couldn’t watch it after a while. While I loved the opening single-shot sequence with the bomb in the car, and the way a lot of shots were set up, the actions of so many of the characters seemed so illogical that it annoyed the hell out of us. Janet Leigh, playing officer Heston’s wife, willingly goes slone with the gangster’s messenger back to his place? Does she have a death wish? And then she talks back to him while alone in his lair, while nobody knows where she is? This copuld’ve been the easiest kidnapping ever!
Or Heston and Leigh jump into their convertible and drive away, right after she has been threatened, and they’ve both seen another convertible blown up by a bomb in the trunk!! Do these people have a veryt shallow learning curve, or what?
Then Heston’s friends leave Leigh in a motel in the middle of nowhere, after she has expressed anxiety over the safety of Mexican motels? The place makes the Bates motel look homey and normal!
We just couldn’t watch anymore. And I like Welles’ stuff, dammit!
Yeah, but when behavior gets so naive that it seems life-threateningly stupid, I eventually decide that these characters are gonna deserve what happens to them, lose all empathy, and change the channel.
Too bad your expectations of where Welles was going ruined a great movie experience for you.
As a Welles fan, you should know that he was going for bigger ideas than just a standard mystery plot, which of course requires an empathetic character to string you along since it offers nothing else.
"True, Welles, at 42, was no longer the beautiful boy wonder of 17 years before, but he added to the bulk he had gained with various prostheses for his part of Hank. He told a story that he returned from the studio late one evening, without taking off his fat suit, extra jowls or beloved putty nose, to host a dinner for a number of moguls. When they recovered from their shock at his appearance, they all complimented him on how well he looked and how much weight he had lost. Welles was (sadly?) amused. "
Wow. I didn’t know that. I knew he was a lot more handsome at that time than the movie let on (even if he was that fat), but I seriously thought that was his own bulk, there.
Calmeacham, you did miss one of the landmarks of cinema. I understand your reservations (though seriously, they never bothered me for a minute), but the characters are partly this way because the book the film was based on was supposedly really bad.
I once tried to show this film to my then-girlfriend, and she fell asleep halfway, btw. I never got her to watch the whole thing.
Touch of Evil is up there in my top five. I could watch that opening dolly a hundred times and still me amazed.
I’ve often felt that scene was a nod to an episode of Suspense! from 1943 called The Singing Walls, in which a young man is drugged with heroin and wakes up in a hotel, framed for murder, with only fragmentary impressions of what happened. The strongest impression that he has is of disembodied music coming through the walls, eerie and distorted. Later, it helps him to piece things together.
Orson had an unusually intimate relationship with Suspense! at the time that The Singing Walls was originally broadcast – he was in the four consecutive episodes that followed it, so it seems likely that he would have been peripheral to its production.