But What a Man:
Welles' Touch of Evil

February 27, 2006

The first time I saw Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil was in 1998 at the time of its theatrical re-release, forty years after its original release. I think Phil and I drove down to the Nuart in Los Angeles for one of our Sunday afternoon movie trips. That same year—1998—also happened to be the year that the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and consumed every vehicle for printed news. That scandal, with its powerful actors Bill Clinton and Ken Starr, served as the perfect framing-device for the movie.

The plot of the film is straightforward: during an investigation of a murder, detective Hank Quinlan (a rotund Orson Welles) plants two sticks of dynamite to frame the man he suspects of having committed the crime. The Mexican narcotics officer Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) realizes the frame and works to prove that Quinlan is a bad cop. This scrutiny drives Quinlan to worse crime in an effort to discredit Vargas, and the movie culminates with a scene in which Quinlan is taped confessing this frame-up and others. Quinlan’s career is over, and we see him at the end stumbling and falling into black dirty water. So good cop beats bad cop, and everyone can stand up and go home.

Not so fast. The genius of the film is the way that simple plot gets complicated through two sub-plots, both involving women. First in importance is the comical neglect of his newly wed wife (Janet Leigh) on the part of the Mexican officer Vargas. Right after the explosion marking the end of the long tracking shot that opens the film, Vargas says something like: “This is bad for us.” And his wife looks quizzically and asks: “How is it bad for us?” And Vargas corrects himself: “I mean for Mexico.” That sets up from the start the disconnect between Vargas the straight-as-an-arrow narcotics officer and Vargas the husband. He wants to get at the truth, but to do so he has to casually send his beautiful wife into disastrous situations.

Quinlan does not exactly have a love interest. He hangs out at a seedy bar owned by the gypsy-like Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), and we understand there was something between them in the past. Through the film we also get details about Quinlan’s motivations. He became a cop because of his wife’s death, and he claims at one point that not a day goes by without thinking of her. Given this history, it is hard.. impossible.. to imagine Quinlan acting like Vargas and putting off his wife in order to sort out a legal matter. In fact it is only because he lost his wife that he is at all interested in crime and his police work.

The two men proceed on opposite assumptions: Quinlan cares not a straw about law, only about life; while Vargas cares not a straw about life, only the law. In 1998 I saw that as a parable of Ken Starr, the ultimate clean lawyer who disregards the messiness of life in order to press home a legalistic charge. Like I said, that political situation was a convenient frame for the film.. although maybe that is the wrong image, since it was the film which allowed me to put the Clinton mess in a new perspective, crystallizing what I disliked about the morally irreproachable Starr.

That was a long time ago. Watching Touch of Evil again Sunday night, and knowing a little more about Orson Welles this time around, I was struck by how it seems to deliver a reading of his own life and career, not from the up-and-coming side as in Citizen Kane, but with the decline firmly in view. It is a film about the great man who cannot follow the procedural rules and gets brought down because of it. Quinlan and those who know him keep talking about “instinct”—and he does seem to get his murderers right—but he is brought down by numbers men, and in particular by a man who would leave his newly wed wife alone in order to prove himself legally right.