Member review

Directed by and starring Orson Welles, ‘Touch of Evil’ is about Charlton Heston’s Ramon Miguel Vargas and his struggle to uncover a mystery whilst attempting to keep his wife Susan (Janet Leigh) safe. All the while, Welles’ own Captain Hank Quinlan is slowly descending into madness.

This film has not aged well at all in many ways. It is problematic, difficult to comprehend and downright rage inducing. I was put off very early on. As soon as I saw Charlton Heston dressed up as Mexican, the film lost me. It never got me back. Aside from Heston, the film has a fairly pejorative view of the actual Mexicans in the film and has troubling implications of rape. Not only is the film racist but it is also sexist. Leigh’s Susan is nothing but a plot device to get Heston from one location to the other. She spends much of the film loitering on a bed in various revealing outfits. She is very much an object. The film may have been using this to make a point but I couldn’t pick anything out of the sort. Every character speaks at the rate of a million words a minute, making it near impossible to figure out what is going on. Combine that with the strange plotting, and the film is quite incomprehensible.

As for the plot, it is quite weak. Heston is not incredibly likeable, not being given any discernible character traits. Welles gives a good performance but still suffers from a lack of diction, making him very hard to understand at times. His character’s descent into madness was partially compelling but the plot it was lost in is far from compelling. There are many plot lines all with various characters, none of whom I ever learnt the names of.

Thankfully, the film is blissfully short. At around an hour and a half, I was delighted for it to be over. This film was painful to watch. It may have been released in 1958 but that didn’t make the discriminatory undertones any less uncomfortable. Did I mention that there’s also a comic relief character who is implied to have disabilities? I would rather bash my head against a wall than sit through this ‘classic’ again.