[This is not meant to comment, indirectly or otherwise, on any current event being covered widely in the media, but is about a longtime American problem, to the extent it relates to anti-Black racism in this country. Commentators for the DVD of this movie certainly so relate it.]
Among films considered the greatest in history, for those who are students of film or just avid film buffs, Citizen Kane (1941) still ranks among the top, and rightly so. This film, loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, was the first and best directorial effort by Orson Welles, a prodigy with earlier noted work on stage and in radio; and even if some viewers today might consider this film a little too old-fashioned for their taste, there’s no denying its historical importance in terms of showing just how much film can do to tell a story: not just unfold a verbal representation, but use imagery in all sorts of ways to help further the story in a way that words alone can’t. Citizen Kane is a compendium of techniques, visual and otherwise—such as deep focus, camera angle, symbolic or simply innovative use of imagery, and visual or sound edits—that would become commonly used in subsequent years, though not always as densely arrayed as here.
Among films considered the greatest in history, for those who are students of film or just avid film buffs, Citizen Kane (1941) still ranks among the top, and rightly so. This film, loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, was the first and best directorial effort by Orson Welles, a prodigy with earlier noted work on stage and in radio; and even if some viewers today might consider this film a little too old-fashioned for their taste, there’s no denying its historical importance in terms of showing just how much film can do to tell a story: not just unfold a verbal representation, but use imagery in all sorts of ways to help further the story in a way that words alone can’t. Citizen Kane is a compendium of techniques, visual and otherwise—such as deep focus, camera angle, symbolic or simply innovative use of imagery, and visual or sound edits—that would become commonly used in subsequent years, though not always as densely arrayed as here.
Welles is also regarded as a pioneer among artistic film directors. While other directors before him—such as Victor Fleming—put together films that have been long and widely famous and loved for aspects other than the artfulness of their directing (such as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind), Welles showed how much a director could stretch the bounds of what made a film art just from such a professional's own standpoint. And of course, by the 1970s, the director became not only the central focus (or dramatically more central than before) of what gave a film character and quality—in the public’s eye as well as in the critic’s—but he or she became the basis for a sort of branding of films.
As Welles has been the subject of scholarship and trade-book studies, all his films—and even unfinished works—have received attention. And when you see some of his other films, despite their flaws there’s always something interesting in them—such as The Lady from Shanghai or The Stranger, both from the 1940s—that echo the grand promise of Citizen Kane. If one were to ask which of his films ranked second and third greatest, probably Touch of Evil (1958) would be second-greatest; and though I haven’t seen it, Chimes at Midnight (1966), which for licensing reasons I believe is still hard to get in the U.S., might be third (it was Welles’ personal favorite, and is esteemed by Welles followers, too).
Touch of Evil is one that I’ve watched repeatedly and with relish—it is a sort of “bastard Citizen Kane” in that it is a genre piece that ostensibly was meant, when Universal contracted for it, not to be anything special, but arguably was Welles’ second and last film, brought to some kind of completion, that featured as much directorial playfulness as did Citizen Kane.
But as a sort of thriller with certain commonalities with the western genre, it uses its visual virtuosity to flesh out a story about corruption, ambiguity, social tension—all the sorts of shadowy facts of grassroots American life that were a focus of attention by the 1950s that the rarefied world of Citizen Kane, inevitably, kept above (it had its own types of corruptions, germane to the level of society it covered). So if Citizen Kane was a study of an American “great man,” Touch of Evil was an amplification of how a talented man—an effective local detective—could be corrupt to the point of being a sort of negative center of gravity in an international-border town, enough to make a sudden emergency readily lend itself to nightmarish shenanigans, snaring a wide range of people.
If you are able to buy, rent, or borrow the 50th-anniversary DVD of Touch of Evil, it has all three versions of the movie: the original, deficient release version; the “preview version” that was discovered in about 1975, which includes some important sequences that flesh out and clarify the plot; and the 1998 “re-edit,” which brings the film most in line with a 58-page memo that Welles wrote to Universal (after being barred from post-production) when the film was still in post-production, in order to put the film most in accord with how Welles had aimed to make it (in some cases, just to make the story more coherent), though he knew it wouldn’t make the film as close to perfect as he could have gotten it if he was in editorial control of it all along.
The different versions have the options of commentary from different parties to its making or scholarship: Rick Schmidlin, the producer in charge of the 1998 re-edit, and Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, who both starred in the film; Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore, who both wrote books on Welles and comment very edifyingly on the preview version (Naremore is especially heartfelt); and F.X. Feeney, another Welles scholar who comments on the release version. There are also mini-documentaries including comments by various persons including Walter Murch, the famous film editor (involved in many of Francis Ford Coppola’s productions, and such more recent films as Cold Mountain), who technically edited the re-edit of Touch of Evil.
For those truly interested in Welles and this film in particular, and who have the time, this is perhaps the richest DVD out there on any Welles work, in explaining the history and virtues of this film. Indeed, the story of this film is complex—showing how Welles was ahead of his time as a film artist, within a producing studio that had little use for such a director—and the college-like scholarship on this film implies it has as much substance as many a work of canonized American literature that students might read.
