POLL: Favorite Cut of Touch of Evil?

[A Sled in Flames]

I started this poll to see what fellow members' opinions are on TOE. It's the only Welles film with all of its multiple versions commercially available in comparable quality.

After watching all three cuts on BD, I'm just going to admit it: I don't like the restored cut or the preview cut. Despite its drawbacks, I think the Studio-meddled Theatrical Cut is the best of the three:

The overture over the opening shot is something I will defend to the last. I know that Orson's initial reaction was to cut it but its such a fantastic theme that gives the story a grandeur from the start. Critics and fans often describe the movie as Baroque, a word stemming from a period of art that was characterized by its drama, tension, exuberence, grandeur, and, above all, embracing of the artifice. I first watched Touch of Evil without the theme, and it really didn't feel complete until I saw the other versions. You see, the shot sans music cinematically makes the shot more naturalistic and suspenseful, but I don't believe that Touch of Evil is a picture where such qualities need to be employed. Welles's films post-The Stranger to me always seem to be borderline absurd (I believe that there's even a thread here saying that TOE borders on craziness); the movie opening with a naturalistic shot betrays the absurd aesthetic and consequently feels oddly out of place. By having an overture (and such a ballsy one composed by Henry Mancini! ), we, as an audience, "get" what the next two hours will be: opera from pulp, and all that entails including its inherent departure, if you will, from reality.

The biggest omission of the theatrical cut is the sequence driving to the motel. I do concede that this creates quite a bit of confusion to the uninitiated viewer but the cut does get rid of the godawful Keller pickup material where the rear-projection shots so strongly contrasts with the live car scene earlier in the movie with Al and Vargas. Additionally, there seems to be less of a reconciliation between Vargas and Suzy without the love sequences in the car. The theatrical cut cuts from them leaving Mexico on shaky terms to Suzy sighing, having arrived at the motel. Without the sequences in between, you can infer that Vargas and Suzy separate a bit mad at each other still, thus making Vargas's later quest to find Suzy a bit more desperate as she didn't depart on good terms. That just seems to be a bit more dramatically intense to me, though I may be reading too much into the cut. Ideally, I think the restored cut should have just skipped the love scene (though I realize it was scripted by Welles) and then cut to Welles's material, meeting up with Quinlan and Menzies and then just continued from there (possibly shortening Menzies in the car with the rear-projection being followed). This would still make Suzy and Vargas not 100% on good terms yet make more sense in the overall plot.

To look at the bigger picture, the theatrical cut also has the fastest pace, out of all three films. The restored cut and especially the preview cut end up dragging where all the additional material is placed, especially the additional tedious reshoot material by Keller. TOE Theatrical seems to be the proverbial slap in the face. It doesn't let up, and the audience is IMHO more immersed because there's not a single dull moment. Understand me though that fast pace is not necessarily a good thing in a movie (ie. I'd hate to see Gone With the Wind or Citizen Kane with scenes hacked out to increase the pace), but I think TOE is a movie that happens to work better with the faster pace of the theatrical cut. I like some of the additional scenes but too many of them are just too many.

I'd love to see another cut of TOE as I realize that the theatrical isn't perfect. But, the preview is too bloated, and I don't agree with a lot of the restored cut's decisions. Also, the restored cut's addition of credits is rather irritating and some of the changes feel sloppily edited and stick out (they don't feel like how something would be edited in the 50s but instead in the 90s). Lastly, I find the theatrical cut of TOE is the best quality on the BD so...

Would like to hear anyone else's take on TOE's versions...

[Roger Ryan]

"A Sled in Flames" - You've provided a really good defense of the "Theatrical Cut" and I really can't disagree with much of your appraisal. All the same, I still prefer the "Reconstructed" version. Many of my favorite moments can be found in the "Preview Cut", but I'm not completely happy with how that one plays out (such as the inclusion of additional Harry Keller material), so the 1998 edit is the one that whips the "Preview Cut" into shape. As far as story resonance is concerned, I think it's crucial we learn how Quillan acquired his limp and how that ties into the discovery of the cane and Menzies' "betrayal". This information is missing from the "Theatrical Cut". I agree that Mancini's opening music score is superb, but as you noted, the score, in addition to the superimposed credits, reduce the magnificent opening shot to an attractive background plate. Welles' two previous attempts to do extended tracking shots near the beginning of his thrillers (THE STRANGER and THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI) sent the editors running for their scissors to trim down the shots because the pacing seemed to lag. I'm glad we can now enjoy this extended shot in TOE the way Welles (probably) intended it, even if it seems oddly protracted.

I have said for years that TOE in all three iterations is still, more or less, the film Welles intended to make. Despite his own frustration with an early version we've never seen (importantly, Universal did follow quite a few of his suggestions to clear up continuity), this film suffered a lot less damage than SHANGHAI or JOURNEY INTO FEAR did.

[edmoney]

While I agree that the additional material in the Restored and Preview cuts help with exposition and character development, my preference is for the Theatrical cut. It's tighter and punchier. The opening title credits are regrettable for sure, but the Mancini score definitely adds flavor to the movie. Fortunately, we have all three cuts. But more often than not, when I'm in the mood for some Touch of Evil I find myself reaching for the Theatrical cut.

[mido505]

O.K., I am putting in my two cents for the preview cut. The theatrical cut omits too much crucial information for me, while the fact that the re-edited version had to be made without recourse to additional footage means that it looks, ironically, rougher and more incomplete than the other two versions. I'm not a fan of the cross-cutting between the the aftermath of the bombing and Suzy's encounter with Uncle Joe, and I find the opening draggy without Henry Mancini's music. I am less "wowed" by the opening long take with the superimposed credits, but the shot actually becomes less dynamic, less suspenseful, and more self-indulgent without them. The explosion is much more shocking coming after a credit sequence than it is coming after what looks like a meandering walk down main street Los Robles.

Schmidlin and Murch re-edited according to one of Welles's memos - so what? When Welles was editing AMBERSONS by cable from Brazil he ordered a "big cut" that removed 22 minutes of footage from the middle of his 132 minute rough cut, to be replaced by a single scene to be shot by Robert Wise. Welles hated the new scene, and demanded that it be re-shot by Norman Foster, which was not done. After the disastrous Pomona preview, Wise actually put a number of those deleted scenes back in in time for the better received Pasadena preview. Were we trying at this date to re-edit a rediscovered 132 minute AMBERSONS according to Welles's original vision, and had only that one cable to advise us, would we be correct to leave those scenes in, or take them out?

A memo is not a movie. The Schmidlin and Murch re-edited version of TOE has no more claim to validity than does anything that Nims and Universal constructed after reading that memo, perhaps less so, as they, unlike Schmidlin and Murch, had access to various earlier memos, various earlier cuts, all the discarded footage, and Welles. Welles actually liked a lot of what editor Ernest Nims had done with his first rough cut of TOE; who knows what TOE would have looked like had Welles been allowed to be more involved in the total editing process? As it is, the preview version is the closest thing we have to Welles's vision - the theatrical version is not a "purer", more streamlined TOE, but a further bastardization, a choppy and incoherent yet stylish and mesmerizing mess that Welles himself hated. It was created for the bottom of a double bill, and died there.

We owe the resurrection of TOE, its current reputation, to the belated discovery of the preview version. That is the version that I fell in love with, that made me call TOE my absolute favorite movie of all time.

[Richard--W]

Who shot the drive to the motel scenes with Susan and Sgt Menzies?
Who shot the motel interaction between Susan, Pancho, the Night Manager and the reefer smoking kids led by Mercedes?
This doesn't look like Orson's footage.

The motel interlude and the drive to it is jarring. It's a different style and aesthetic than the rest of the film. Sunny and straight-forward instead of dark, it takes us right out of the noirish atmosphere Orson and the dp have established.

Since Susan is moved to a hotel room in the city and wakes up there that whole business should have stayed in the city.

The opening scene without credits or music has the effect of dropping us into the middle of a narrative already underway, which the film is, the way Orson intended. It grabs our attention instantly. Credits and music just get in the way.

Susan's journey across the border with Pancho to meet Grandi should not be interrupted, either. The suspenseful is lost in the cutting away.

I fell in love with the theatrical version, which I saw on television and in repertory theaters before the home video era. Later I fell in love with Touch of Evil all over again when the restoration was released theatrically in 1998. It makes me want to grab the camera and start shooting something. There is so much good material in the preview and reconstructed versions. I like them all, but I would like to make my own fan edit, using only Orson's footage with the theatrical version as baseline.

[Roger Ryan]

Who shot the drive to the motel scenes with Susan and Sgt Menzies?
Who shot the motel interaction between Susan, Pancho, the Night Manager and the reefer smoking kids led by Mercedes?
This doesn't look like Orson's footage.

As I noted in another thread, I believe the brief sequence of Menzies driving Susan to the motel (with Grandi tailing) is a re-shoot given the use of rear projection which Welles disliked for traveling car shots (note how Welles shot the scene between Vargas and Schwartz in the car). However, the "motel interaction" material is all Welles and is blocked like a Welles film. Dennis Weaver noted that Welles improvised a lot of the footage involving the "night man" during the shoot (his character is referred to as an "old man" in Welles' final shooting script and only appears in the scene with Vargas). Clearly, Welles was impressed with what Weaver was giving him so the character was beefed up. These kind of comic digressions (that have little to do with the main plot or lead characters) usually ended up on the cutting room floor when Welles' earlier films were re-edited (Ambersons, Journey Into Fear and Lady From Shanghai all have examples of this). In other words, this is not the kind of material the studio would want added to the film.

Whether it's the best choice or not, Susan being taken to the remote motel is part of Welles' plotting. In fact, apart from the brief exchange between Vargas and Schwartz near the hotel stairwell, everything that appears in the "reconstructed" edit was scripted or improvised by Welles (even if a couple of the scripted scenes were re-shot by Harry Keller). It's possible that Welles changed or expanded his own versions of the scenes where Vargas and Susan talk in the car and when Vargas joins Quinlan while Menzies drives Susan to the motel. These changes may have displeased the studio who then brought in Keller to re-shoot the scenes as originally scripted by Welles. This is speculative, but it's odd that little of Welles' script was changed for the material that was re-shot.

[Richard--W]

Once again I appreciate your considered response, Roger Ryan.

It's not odd when you consider that the producers wanted the film, they just didn't want Welles.

Okay, so Orson wrote the motel scenes and directed them. Probably.

Orson went off on a tangent with these motel scenes. Yes, I understand he wanted to contrast the dark night scenes across the border with bright daytime scenes on the American side, but it's still going off on a tangent. Driving to the motel tortures the plotting and drags on the pace. He already had what he needed in Venice, CA (where the border town scenes were shot) for that. True, it's clever, well directed and well acted, but it's still going off on a tangent, and again, it could have been just as clever, well directed and well acted in Venice. This going off on tangents -- trying new story ideas and changing the plans after budget and schedule had been fixed -- is precisely why he never finished Mr. Arkadin.

Somebody needs to dig deep into the manuscript collections and payroll records and nail, once and for all, which scripted scenes Harry Keller shot and or reshot.