Unnerving Cinema: Touch of Evil (1958)

Is there a more unnerving film that "Touch of Evil", Orson Welles' final Hollywood film from 1958? If there is, I haven't seen it.

I re-watched the 1998 reconstruction by Walter Murch last night on DVD, and I have to say it's one of the most tense, unnerving and unsettling experiences I've ever had while watching a film. From the very first shot, when a ticking time-bomb is placed in the trunk of a car, to that final confrontation between Vargas and Quinlan by the bridge, every second of the film had my stomach in knots.

I won't write about the film's various technical achievements here, nor its "place" in the film noir canon (I'll leave that for another time). Instead, I want to focus on just why the film is so successful in creating a sense of very real panic and dread. The scenes with Janet Leigh in the motel room, owned by the family who her husband (Charlton Heston) is currently prosecuting, are even more unsettling for me than the similar scenes of Janet Leight in another motel room in Hitchcock's "Psycho". Even Dennis Weaver manages to deliver a somehow more maniacal, frightening performance for me that Anthony Perkins in the Hitchcock film. It is a tribute to Welles' talent that, even without aiming for pure "horror", he delivers a situation just as frightening as anything out of a horror film.

The most unsettling aspect might be the film's theme of betrayal, in which no one is safe from the corrupt hand of the law, personified by Welles' gross, bloated Quinlan. The one honest officer (Heston) sees his life, and that of his new wife, torn to shreds within a day of his involvement in the investigation that has led to the conflict.

"Touch of Evil" has gotten a mixed response, but it may be a case of a film that was ahead of its time in 1958, along with other masterworks by real film artists, including Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and Ford's "The Searchers", both films that somewhat confused audiences at the time by their self-reflexive nature and their somewhat unconventional approach to then-common generic conventions. Welles delivers a film noir that is so self-reflexive, and so conversant in all the conventions and expectations of that genre (while subverting them at the same time), that it effectively put an end to the "classic" noir period (although I would argue that it had been coming for some time, especially with the hyper-noirish films of the 50s such as Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly"). Part of the film's unsettling nature may not come from the actual content at all, then, but from the assured mastery of Welles' technique in shattering our expectations of the genre.

The Future of DVD?

I just wanted to share a few thoughts on a trend that I've noticed recently:

I've been watching with some interest over the last several months as the emergence of Blu-Ray videodiscs have begun to make their appearance in the market with more and more frequency. The advantage to DVD collectors such as myself has been that studios are clearly trying to get rid of their old DVD inventory as fast as possible, which means you can purchase discs that haven't even been in stores in years for under $6 now.

I first noticed this back in the Spring of this year, when I visited one of the big chain retailers and noticed that the standard DVDs were being sold for used-DVD prices. I picked up copies of "High Sierra", "The Red Badge of Courage" and a John Wayne collection, all for under $10 each.

In another large seller of DVDs, I came across a copy of Howard Hawks' "Barbary Coast", as well as Ralph Bakshi's "Heavy Traffic", both of which were selling for $6.99 plus 40% off! They're practically giving these away now.

The reason I mention this is that, when the Blu-Ray format completely supplants DVD, I wonder how many of the older titles will be available in that format at all? DVD was both a blessing and a curse for older titles. On the one hand, we saw releases of stuff that would never in a million years have seen the light of day on VHS-Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise" and "Design for Living", and the majority of the W.C. Fields films, just for starters. However, it's difficult to know whether or not studios will go through the effort of creating all-new HD transfers of these titles for the Blu-Ray format, especially since, in the case of many older films, the original negatives no longer exist.

There's also the issue of whether or not the sales of those same titles on DVD will ever justify re-releasing them in upgraded versions. I'm thinking of the sudden downturn in the number of silent films released on DVD by Warner Bros./Turner. It's hard to believe that "The Big Parade", "The Crowd" and, most notably, "Greed", never saw the light of day on DVD. It's very hard to say whether or not they will ever come out in the Blu-Ray format either.

Obviously, this is just speculation at best. I'm not trying to predict so much as just explain a few concerns I've had over the changing medium. DVD certainly made available a number of titles that we're never going to come out on VHS, but at the same time, there were far more films released in the VHS format that never did come out on DVD at all. Blu-Ray may be a similar trade-off. For instance, I'm sure we'll get the restored "Metropolis" on Blu-Ray, but not on DVD. However, will the "Die Nibelungen" films, or "Spies", or "Dr. Mabuse", ever be available in that format?

Aside from "The Wizard of Oz", "Gone with the Wind" and possibly "Casablanca", I suspect that the oldest titles we'll see on Blu-Ray will be the Universal horror films, which have been packaged and re-packaged more times than I care to think about. We might also see the Marx Bros. films in a set from Universal again, but that remains to be seen. These are just some of the likeliest titles I would expect to see in the coming year or so.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to watch how distributors select which titles to upgrade for Blu-Ray, and it will be even more interesting to see how consumers respond to the selection.