Touch of Evil (1958)

'Touch of Evil' tells the story of our protagonist Vargas (Charlton Heston), battling the competing interests of the criminal Mexican underworld and the corrupt police department represented by Orson Welles in his search for the truth.

Grabbing the viewer's attention right off the bat, the stunning opening sequence tracking shot involves the viewer directly in the events of the violent border town between Mexico and the USA, ending with a stunning explosion. The film is certainly visually sound; there is extensive use of close up reaction shots to portray the emotions of the characters, and this works very well, especially when addressing the grotesque Quinlan and his ruthless cunning.

This sequence immediately introduces the moral core of the film; the corrupt police chief Orson Welles and the true meaning of justice. Orson Welles gives a great performance, but the problem is that there is not much performance to give; the biggest wasted opportunity of this film is to truly explore the fall from grace of this police officer and how the authorities can come to resemble the criminals they oppose. In reality, police captain Quinlan is a bad apple from the start - established as the foil to our protagonist Vargas. No explanation is ever offered as to his behaviour - he more or less comes across as a drunk, rambling, often incoherent old man, not a tragic story of authority and corruption. Vargas himself is totally lacking character - he is essentially just a blank slate, whose only meaningful attribute is that he is the 'good guy'. We as the audience can't relate to him or his damsel in distress wife as both are completely unlikable and lacking character, as artificial as the often poor dialogue dubbed in in post-production. I never got the sense that this is a loving couple - this is mostly a writing problem and not a performance one, as Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston both have charisma, however the script portrayed them as quite distant from each other, spending most of the film apart with only brief communication.

The plot is often meandering and confused - the intersecting plot lines of Vargas' eternally persecuted wife and the uncomfortable events that follow and Vargas' fight against corruption are cut between seemingly randomly and incoherently - the end result is that a good portion of the film is spent in a hotel room, as the Mexican mafia harass Vargas' wife for a reason which alludes me and, I'm sure, a good segment of the audience. Again, the moral exploration that this film offered of corruption and how it becomes systemic held great promise, but this is portrayed in a generic format of good against evil, in a often incomprehensible manner that doesn't involve the audience at all in what's going on. The end sequence epitomises this, as these potentially interesting characters are boiled down to their simplest traits of good and evil and behave nonsensically in order to further the plot to a resolution.

Overall, 'Touch of Evil' held great promise - the ideas portrayed of corruption and innocence, and its implications for the justice system were very good, however the characters fail to live up to that promise as they are mostly bland and uninteresting, and the poorly paced, sometimes incomprehensible plot made this story fall flat. The side characters are mostly forgettable and it leaves the viewer without a relate-able character with which to identify and root for. As a result, the film is mostly just a series of events, some of which are visually interesting but none of which are particularly emotionally engaging, as the film plods along towards a generic, unsatisfying conclusion.