Now that we can compare all three versions of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil on DVD, here are the last twelve pages from Welles’s original script, so we can see just how much Welles concept evolved during the actual shooting of the film. This script includes Welles changes up until February 16, 1957, two days before he actually started shooting the film on February 18, 1957.
As can be seen from these script pages, Welles took important dialogue sequences that he had originally crammed into the climax, and wisely transposed them to places earlier in the film. The two most notable being Quinlan’s clash with Vargas over how a policeman should conduct his job (”a policeman’s job is only easy in a police state”), and Quinlan’s nostalgic, Bernstein-like remembrance of his young wife’s murder, which he still thinks about every day, as told to his long time friend and partner of 18 years, Pete Menzies.
Welles decision to move both of these scenes clearly helped the overall structure of the movie, by giving us important information on the characters’ background earlier in the film, while keeping audiences from becoming too overloaded with information during the picture’s climax.
The first transposed scene establishes Quinlan’s antagonistic attitude towards Vargas right off the bat, when they first meet during the investigation of Rudy Linnekar’s car exploding. The second scene gives us the reason for Quinlan’s obsession with strapping murderers to the electric chair, explaining how the killer of Quinlan’s young wife got away scot-free when Quinlan was just a rookie detective.
Of course, that is a device Welles claimed to have greatly abhorred in Citizen Kane – dollar book Freud he called it – but in reality, it works quite well in both Kane and in Touch of Evil. After all, how else can you explain a great man’s life in such a short period of time? Likewise, how can we understand the reasons for Quinlan’s actions, without a case history… As a screenwriter, this is a very quick and effective device for explaining Quinlan’s “compulsion” to frame his murder suspects.
There is also a wonderful bit when Quinlan asks Menzies if he recalls one of their past cases, where Mr. Burger killed Mrs. Burger with an axe in the basement, chopping her into bloody bits. While it didn’t make it into the film, it certainly gives the movie one more “touch” of Hitchcock, right before Janet Leigh made Psycho in a very similar California motel only a year later.
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The script excerpt below begins as Menzies approaches Tanya’s to get the drunken Quinlan out of her establishment, so he can tape Quinlan’s confession without the pianola music ruining the recording. But in this version of the script Tanya has not yet been fully developed; instead she is called “Mother Lupe” and it is easy to imagine Welles using Katina Paxtinou for the part of “Mother Lupe,” if Dietrich should have turned him down. It is also significant that Welles includes almost no indication of any of the visual stylistics or camera shots he was to actually use in the climax of his movie. Clearly, the elaborate camera work he would eventually employ was to be based almost entirely on the locations that he had found in Venice, CA, so there was no need to include camera instructions that would be dictated by the locations – other then a vague suggestion of what Welles might want to accomplish in the scene.
Welles told Andre Bazin some of the reasons why he shot the scene as he did, in these interview comments from Cahiers du Cinema in 1958:
ORSON WELLES: Vargas has to go through this labyrinth, among the derricks, because he is the intruder; it’s a scene where there is no place for him. Two old friends are talking; if they saw Heston, nothing would happen. I therefore thought he ought to look as though he was having a hard time of it, laboring, as one labors to dig up gold, climbing, like one climbs a mountain. This kind of job doesn’t suit him and he detests it, as he says to Menzies: at this moment Vargas loses his integrity. He is therefore thrown into a world in which he does not morally belong; he becomes the low kind of person who listens at doors and he isn’t able to do it. I’ve therefore tried to make it as though the machine were leading him, so that he is the victim of that, rather than of his own curiosity. He isn’t very familiar with how to use the recording machine, and he just follows it and obeys it, because this thing doesn’t belong to him; he’s not a spy, he isn’t even a cop.
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