Ages ago (okay, early last year) I picked up a bunch of film magazines that were being thrown out. I had intended to somehow use them on the site, but put them in a box and consequently forgot about them. I stumbled over them again recently, and seeing as how I hadn�t posted in a while, I thought I might throw up the odd thing from them. Here then is Films in Review�s review of Touch of Evil, from their April 1958 issue. As you will see, it is not especially flattering�

�The subject matter of Touch of Evil is so banal and its story-line is so confusing, that, as crime melodrama, it is fit only for theatres which grind out �Bs� fifteen or more hours a day. However, in addition to �action fans,� as, pathetically, they are called in the trade, quite a few professional filmmakers � directors, photographers, and actors, but no writers or editors � will also go to see Touch of Evil. Reason: Orson Welles has furbished it with photographic, directorial and acting �touches� which compensate for the irrationality of the picture itself.

Welles played one of the leads, wrote the script, directed, and induced some talented friends to appear in a farrago which ordinarily would be beneath their dignity. Marlene Dietrich plays a gypsy madam, Charlton Heston a Mexican narcotics agent, Janet Leigh his American wife, Akim Tamiroff the corrupt boss of a Mexican border town, Joseph Calleia a double-crossing police sergeant, and Welles a Mexican-hating and criminal-framing American police captain. The face of Joseph Cotten is momentarily on view, and other good performers, not so well known, put it brief appearances.

The role Welles wrote for himself is interesting for a reason extraneous to this film. It is a synthetic assemblage of negative characteristics which appeal to Welles, one surmises, for private rather than professional reasons. Indeed, one suspects that the reason Welles was sufficiently interested to write the part of such an implausible character, to act it, direct it, and surround it, with cinematic talent, is because such a character seems to him to make a mockery of the moral values of the background from which Welles himself came � values which Welles must again embrace if he is ever to be the artist he could be.� — Jeremy Browne