Welles Marathon: Touch of Evil (1958)

Touch of Evil was one of the few Orson Welles movies I had seen before I started this marathon, but I was excited to re-watch considering I haven't seen it in a long time.  But appropriately enough, I'm pretty sure I watched a different version.  It's Orson Welles, so of course there are more versions than just one.  Couldn't be easy!

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I think critics have a tendency to overrate movies based on the technical skill of how the movie was made.  And I think this is especially true of older movies analyzed retroactively, because we can see the influence they made.  And I'm all for putting the movie's accomplishments into context to better appreciate it.

But there's a difference, I think, between appreciating what the movie did and looking at how good the movie actually is.  I can appreciate that what a movie did was impressive while also thinking that for whatever reason the movie hasn't necessarily aged well, and I don't even mean in terms of political correctness or the sort.  

The version I watched this time is evidently much more clear in terms of plotting than the version I think I watched the first time, but it has a wide swath of time given to what I think is a black hole.  And that's when Susan Vargas is threatened by a gang in the motel in the middle of nowhere.  

None of this part of the movie works in my opinion.  I do not remember this part being quite as prominent in the first version I watched, like significantly less screen time was dedicated to it.  I don't know what the fuck Dennis Weaver is doing in this movie, but his performance as the hotel manager is quite terrible.  Like these motel scenes alone drag this movie down.

I think there a couple of scenes in this movie that made this movie a classic to most.  The opening scene is the clearest example.  It's a memorable and impressive way to begin a movie.  And I believe there's another unbroken take in an interrogation scene later in the movie. 

I began my review noting that I think certain critics overrate movies because of how they're shot, and the reason I did that was to provide to following anecdote.  In Roger Ebert's "Great Movies," he says that Peter Bogdanovich once told Orson that he didn't notice the story until he had already saw it four or five times, because he was focused on the direction.

Ebert follows that up with saying "That might be the best approach for anyone seeing the film for the first time: to set aside the labyrinthine plot, and simply admire what is on the screen."  That's all well and good, but this feels like a backhanded compliment to me, or at least not as much of a compliment as intended.  What's great about the movie are the shots, but as a story, well go ahead and ignore that to really enjoy it.

But between the disastrous motel scenes, Charlton Heston playing a Mexican, and that it's better enjoyed if you ignore the story, well these are a little too much for me to accept personally.  I'm not saying it's a bad film.  It's actually mostly a good film.  But I don't think it's a classic and I think it's probably one of Welles' more overrated movies.

3/4 stars