By RAY KELLY
Richard Deming’s Touch of Evil — the latest offering in Bloomsbury Publishing’s relaunch of the BFI Film Classics series — looks at Orson Welles’ role as screenwriter, as well as director and star of the 1958 film.
Deming, a senior lecturer in English and director of creative writing at Yale University, sees the film as an outstanding example of the noir genre and explores its complex relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson.
“Badge of Evil is a solid potboiler, but it has no grand ambitions. Welles uses the basic idea of the novel and remakes it as a meditation on cruelty, irony, and the intrinsic complexity of trying to respond justly to an unjust world. There are so many differences between the novel and the novel, it is hard to catalogue them all,” Deming told Wellesnet. “Some broad differences, just to name a few, are that Welles transferred the setting of the action from San Diego to the U. S. Mexico border; the novel’s protagonist, Mitch Holt, becomes Miguel “Mike” Vargas in the movie; and Welles wholly invented the opening scene, one of the most famous in cinema, and offered it as a master class in developing suspense that arguably out does Hitchcock in its use of dramatic irony.”
He added. “As ever, however, it is Welles’s deep sense of how to use the visual elements of cinema to evoke rather than explain, to gesture and suggest rather than to declaim and illustrate, that so transfigures the novel’s raw material.”
Deming called Welles “one of the greatest figures in cinema.”
“Whereas many directors get more and more restrained as they mature — especially if their work doesn’t always fare so well at the box office — Welles become more and more daring,” Deming said. “Visually, Touch of Evil is as radical and innovative a film as any ever produced by a major studio. It is morally complicated, dark, provocative, and the more one watches it, the more one sees in every frame. I have also been so amazed with what Welles did with his own acting. It seems incredible that he wanted to make his own character so visually repulsive and would slur his lines and mumble. His voice was a precision instrument, so his willingness to take his greatest strength as an actor and do that kind of damage to it so as to make such an unforgettable character seems truly remarkable. Also, the history of the film and its multiple versions is fascinating and raises the issue of what the ‘authentic’ text of a film really is.”
Filmed more than 60 years ago, Touch of Evil remains both relevant and radical, Deming said.
“To begin with, it’s concerned with thinking about borders and the way they invent an illusory sense of order based on constructed divisions. There is also the central issue of people believing what they want to believe and forcing and deforming facts to fit a narrative. That, of course, seems entirely pertinent,” Deming said. “In the film, Vargas says to Hank Quinlan, ‘A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.’ Welles himself has said that he thinks of that has the argument of Touch of Evil. That certainly feels contemporary.”
He added, “It is regrettable that there is a bit of ‘brown face’ with Charlton Heston playing Vargas. Of course, without Heston, the film wouldn’t have been made at all. At the same time, however, the character of Vargas is so complex that familiar stereotypes and signifiers of race and class are dismantled or inverted and thus in many ways the film is extremely forward looking.”
In the book, Deming notes the three versions available to audiences: the 93-minute theatrical release; a 108-minute “preview” version released in 1976; and the 1998 re-release incorporating changes sought by Welles in a 58-page memo written to Universal some 41 years earlier. Deming notes that 1998 release is best termed a revision and not “restored” to Welles’ original vision because his memo was in response to changes made by the studio and doesn’t reflect all of his recommendations.
In addition to his Touch of Evil book, Deming is also a poet, art critic and author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, and Art of the Ordinary: the Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Literature, and Philosophy. He has contributed to Sight & Sound, Artforum and The Boston Review. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Other Welles-related titles in the BFI Film Classics series include Citizen Kane by Laura Mulvey and The Magnificent Ambersons by V.F. Perkins.
(Richard Deming’s Touch of Evil is available through Bloomsbury Publishing, Amazon and Barnes and Noble.)
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