Touch of Evil: 50th Anniversary Edition

Even its greatest enthusiasts tend of damn Touch of Evil, Orson Welles’s storied and ultimately ill-fated 1958 directorial effort, with faint praise, calling it the best B-movie ever made. Fact is, Touch of Evil — a director-for-hire job Welles took after he was cast as a corrupt police chief in an American border town — is most fascinating for its back-story, not for what’s on screen. And to its credit, this 50th Anniversary Edition does that back-story justice while presenting the film in the most flattering light possible. When Welles finished the film — then moved on in search of other, better opportunities before a final edit was completed, which turned out to be a fatal mistake — the studio re-shot scenes and re-cut the film, turning it into a confused, muddled mess. What they were attempting was to make its complex, noir-ish plot clearer; what they didn’t realize was that the film was already muddled nearly beyond comprehension and they were making it worse. Famously, upon seeing the studio’s efforts, Welles wrote a 58-page memo outlining what he hated and how it should be fixed, which the studio ignored, releasing its version in 1958. The film overcame its oddities — such as the sight of Charlton Heston as a Mexican politician — to become an admired piece of the Welles canon. But word always circulated that this was a hackneyed version, that somewhere in the film was the masterpiece Welles envisioned, a holy grail of lost film history. In 1998, the film was meticulously restored and re-edited (as closely as possible) to Welles’s original memo. And it’s better, much better, but what it’s not is a great film; fans cite The Big Sleep as a great film whose plot makes little sense but Touch of Evil, for all its delights, is no Big Sleep. If the end result isn’t amazing, its journey is, and that’s the main draw of this two-disc DVD issue, containing for the first time the original theatrical version, a "preview” version that Welles showed studios originally and the 1998 restored version. Add to that featurettes on the restoration an historical "making of,” commentaries on all three versions (by historians and scholars, plus Heston and Janet Leigh) and a reproduction of Welles’s original memo. It’s not that Touch of Evil is a great film — though it does open with one of the greatest single tracking shots in film history — it’s that its journey to not-greatness is fascinating and revealing of a world that mistreated the genius of Orson Welles all too often.