Murch's edit of Touch of Evil a "travesty" - Bright Lights After Dark Story

[Terry]

His early 50s stuff was a bit different from his later schmaltzy ballads and bright theme songs, which I also really like by the way.

No I will not mention what I'm picturing in accompaniment to the Baby Elephant Walk.

Yeah, his golden age stuff had some seriously brassy balls.

And don't forget the input Welles had on that soundtrack, especially, as I recall, the Latin influences.

[ToddBaesen]

Kevin:

Interesting insights, since I, and probably anyone who has seen the earlier TOE versions several times would admit, since it is difficult for us to accept the textless opening without the Main Title music by Mancini. It's hard to be objective about something you enjoy, even if Welles says he didn't want it that way. As a virgin to it, if you think it works, you may be right...

A more drastic example might be looking at PSYCHO without the music by Herrmann. As Hitchcock said, he didn't want music behind the shower murder. But Herrmann added it and Hitchcock accepted it, since it was obviously better that way. Now, if you turn off the music for that scene, I think it would still be a great sequence, but how could anyone who had seen that scene with the music possibly accept it without Herrmann's score? It would be like changing the soundtrack to OTHELLO! So it becomes a very difficult task to evaluate, once you have seen the film so many times a certain way, whether it's what the director wanted or not.

On the other hand, if you look at the murder scene in TORN CURTAIN without any music, than watch it with Herrmann's score (that was thrown out by Hitchcock), you can easily see it would have been so much more effective with the Herrmann score.

In any case, this can all be very subjective, depending on how many times you've seen the film in question, before you see a different version.

[Tony]

Todd: gotta disagree with you on the TC scene: I think with the music it doesn't work nearly as well without. The trend at that time was more towards less movie music and more towards nothing or source music.

[Terry]

I disagree with Tony! That scene is dead without the music cue. With Herrmann's score it's devastating.

[Tony]

Okaaaaaaaaay, Missster Hadgi....

Actually, my point was that movie music became more naturalistic in the mid-sixties, and Herrmann's style went out of fashion for about 10 years. Star Wars, Jaws and the other blockbusters of the 70s brought that style back.

[Randy Cook]

Great thread. Might I add a few random thoughts?

I found the opening to be improved by the omission of the titles simply because the titles diffused the suspense of the scene. I knew Welles was going for suspense here, instilling fear in the audience whenever the ticking bomb drove close to Mike and Susan; but I never really FELT that suspense until I saw it without titles (or felt it as much as I could after several score viewings).

The sacrifice of the Mancini theme (which I love) I feel helped as well, as there's nothing in the music which reinforces the fear that our lead actors are about to get blown up. My only complaint is that the source music was a collage of cues cribbed from the film's score, no doubt Murch's only real option. However, having watched the film obsessively over the last 40 years I kept flashing forward to the different scenes from which these cues were lifted, a personal reaction which would not bother a first-time viewer.

As to the Susan/Grandi intercutting, I BELIEVE Welles wanted to cut back to them on "...just a little while ago, this was a quiet, peaceful town here...". I think this'd be an improvement. As it stands in the Murch edit, we leave the confrontation with Susan informing Grandi that she might be scared, but her husband won't be...a simple declaration without benefit of Grandi's reaction. Letting that scene play a bit further, the tension is heightened when Susan insults Grandi, and then threatens him that she's about to start yelling. He meanacingly advises against such action, gives his psychotic little half-laugh, and turns away. A better place to cut away, as something's got to give and the audience is left worrying over how the situation's going to resolve. We cut back, then, to Grandi on the move toward the mirror, in mid-rant. Each side of the cut is on Grandi's movement and technically a good place to cut. Emotionally, I feel it's superior.

Perhaps Murch found that this left us with a tense situation which diffuses too suddenly upon our return to the action; arguable, of course, but the sense of danger is sufficiently heightened at the Welles-suggested cut-away that it seems to invalidate that argument.

I'll weigh in on the Tanya/Quinlan scene while I'm at it: I wish they'd let the pianola play under the whole scene. Its cheap nostalgic quality does evoke strong emotions of loss (didn't Welles, in the script, request a piano roll of "Avalon"? If so, Mancini went one better) and, as Quinlan indicates he'll be back after the case is over, it is certainly reflective of his emotional arc through the scene. Quinlan's hope to return to some semblance of the past is a false one, fuelled by his nostalgia, which the music emotionally represents: the pianola leads him on and, rather sadly, mocks him. Wish they'd left it in.

The 1:85 matting? Well, lots of movies were theatrically shown in 1:85 back in 1958. I didn't see it then, probably because I was sitting through repeated screenings of 7th VOYAGE OF SINBAD until I had permanent retinal afterimages, so I can't speak to its original presentation. Didn't see TOE until 1969 in Bob Epstein's UCLA film history class, and it totally changed how I looked at movies. This was a year or two before Epstein stumbled upon the "long edit"...you can imagine what an exciting screening THAT was and, yeah, I was there.
I think Bob showed it in academy aperture and, while I prefer it that way, it was probably widely exhibited in 1:85 on its original release.

For whatever that's worth.

Anyhow, kudos to Murch for righting numerous wrongs in TOE, they more than make up for the things he didn't get quite right.


Oh, btw, the transfer of TOE is soft as hell. I have a Denon 3910 dvd player that has horizontal and vertical offsets which helps the problem, but here's hoping a good High Definition transfer isn't TOO many years away.

[ToddBaesen]

Randy:

Thanks for your interesting thoughts on TOE... By a strange coincidence I was looking at some of the shots you helped Peter Jackson design for FOTR, namely the approach of the Balrog on the stairway in Khazad-dum, and I was wondering if you could comment on whether Peter Jackson ever brought up Orson Welles (or if he didn't, whether you did).

I'd be especially interested to know if Peter Jackson had screened or mentioned the battle of Shrewsbury from CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, before doing any of his fabulous battle sequences in TTT or RETURN OF THE KING.

[Harvey Chartrand]

The Walter Murch / TOUCH OF EVIL RE-EDIT CONTROVERSY CONTINUES at http://www.brightlightsfilm.blogspot.com/

See February 21/07 posting. :angry:

[Terry]

Here are some telling comparisons between TOE in widescreen and fullscreen:

Screenshots

[ToddBaesen]

Here is Jonathan Rosenbaum's reply to the BRIGHT LIGHTS blogger's complaints about the "director's cut" of TOUCH OF EVIL. As JR points out, the writer apparently didn't look at Welles origninal memo. Interesting also that he insists on saying the Murch re-edit was sold as "a director's cut." I always felt it was quite clear that no one working on the fim thought of the re-edit as a directors cut, and Rosenbaum, Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch all made that perfectly clear in all the many interviews they did when the film came out.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: Briefly, I was consultant on the Murch cut, so it's misleading to say that I praised it; I'm partly responsible for it. We (I, Murch, and producer Rick Schmidlin) went out of our way to insist in all the press materials that what we were doing WASN'T a director's cut or a restoration, so your point about Beatrice, who knew practically nothing about it, is invalid.

It seems to me that the best way to approach the logic of our cut would be to consult the memo itself, available on www.wellesnet.com/touch_memo1.htm, which you haven't bothered to do.

We never wanted our version to supplant the others. This is exclusively Universal's decision.

[Randy Cook]

Hi Todd

Well, as Peter stared in his FELLOWSHIP commentary, I had a lot to do with the chorreography of the scene you mentioned, so I suppose I can speak to that briefly without sounding too self-serving.

That particular scene was the first one I worked on when I arrived in New Zealand in late 1998. Peter had asked me to do some work for him in the early nineties on another, unproduced picture (lamentably so, as the script by Peter and Danny Mulheron was very good) and I declined, since it was in New Zealand and I had a rudimentary knowledge of geography.

When they announced RINGS I contacted him, and he asked me to come down to design action sequences for him.

For the stairs scene a bunch of us gathered around the large model Weta had fabricated and tossed ideas around in a very collaborative, informal way. A computer model was built as were very rough figures of the characters who'd appear in the scene. Peter and I had some morer discussions about the scene's basic shape, the multiple jeopardy of the characters trying to cross this dangerous gap in the broken stairs while persued by a balrog and further menaced by orc-archers. I then did a rough animation of the characters, for action and timing, from a neutral point of view.

While the choreography was supposedly blocked-out without concern for the cameras, I naturally was developing camera angles as the blocking progressed: it's a very organic process, of course, and it's natural for one to carefully consider the camera at this stage.

Consultation again with Peter, and some changes and adjustments to action, and then the camera blocking. I offered up camera angles and a cutting pattern, which Peter would consider and usually accept, though many setups were created in collaboration with him (both of us sitting at the computer, pushing the camera around, choosing lenses, etc) and he had a lot of ideas of his own for setups, of course.

Animation, though very rough, was fleshed out A BIT at this stage, so the actions were made very clear...this was used as a guide for the second unit director who shot the scenes, following the animatic very closely indeed.

I don't think that we discussed Welles at that stage, although I cannot imagine devising a visual scene of this type without him very much in my subconcious at all times. I never copied any specific shots of his consciously, but if the scene recalls Welles in any way to you I must say I am deeply flattered, because I obviously esteem him so very highly.

So, his influence is certainly there and I am very happy if it in some way shows. It's an action scene but one that's as much character-based as it is gag-based, and it strives to involve the viewer with the characters in a way that makes the gags seem, not like gags, but inevitable progressions in the course of action.

As to the Battle. Well, I don't think Peter was familiar with CHIMES, but he did like BRAVEHEART a lot and I did a dub of CHIMES for Christian Rivers, his storyboard man (and a good action director in his own right). Christian took over as PreVis head when I left to supervise the animation on the films. Don't believe Christian had seen CHIMES either, but I suspect he was struck by the similarity BRAVEHEART had to the earlier picture. I remember seeing BRAVEHEART in the theatre and thinking how WEIRD all those shots from CHIMES looked in color: I cannot help but feel that they must watched the Welles picture more than once...


Randy

[Terry]

The battle scenes in LOTR immediately reminded me of Shrewsbury. They both employed that blow/counterblow cutting that Welles was trying to do. Exemplary work in both films.