Through a Glass Darkly

The leading citizen of a U.S.-Mexico border town has a timebomb slipped into his convertible’s trunk Stateside and explodes three minutes later in Mexico. Employed on the case of his murder is Vargas (Charlton Heston), a prosecutor from Mexico City on honeymoon with his American wife (Janet Leigh); and from the other side is Captain Quinlan (Orson Welles), the bumptious American police chief, a crusty and unscrupulous veteran who solves cases on the whims of his game leg that twitches when he feels a lead. From the two men’s first interaction filmed in titanic low-angle close-ups, an antagonism is understood. Vargas catches Quinlan framing a suspect for the murder, and from here the situation quickly deteriorates into such a nightmarish shadow game of death and manipulation that this initial crime plot is quite forgotten for most of the film. It appears that Welles, making his first (and final) Hollywood film in 10 years, has learned to abandon the banalities of genre that made The Stranger (1946) seem like a misstep to film buffs, and prefers to unfold an exercise in style. 

With that said, revisiting it days after The Stranger (1946), the films' premises are remarkably similar: the overthrow of a corrupt tyrant embedded in a community by an innocent and pure interloper. In both films Welles tries to complicate this dynamic in different ways, more successfully so in the latter. In The Stranger, the villain is an unequivocal monster masquerading as the handsome and well-liked bastion of a small American town, while the hero is rather squat and innocuous. The villain in Touch of Evil both looks and acts monstrous, but the famous joke at the story's end is that the man he framed was indeed guilty of the crime, and, by implication, so were his prior frame-jobs. All of Vargas' exertions in exposing Quinlan, right as he may have been to do so, were a denial of the truth while implicating his wife, Susie, in an unceasing nightmare of kidnapping and torture by Quinlan and the Grandis as a means of blackmailing her clueless husband.

My favourite poster image for the film is the "Restored Version"'s original DVD cover, which is a little bit vulgar, like most DVD covers, but provides an enjoyably moody interpretation of the film, with the giant head of Quinlan looming over his victims under the mystical blue sheen of a crystal ball. This terrible, rusting border town Welles creates is the physical soul of Quinlan, that burbling, limping mess, so corpulent he becomes something mythic, something more than human, in the pit of whose stomach lies the infinite annals of the police file room, the endless pumping of serried oil rigs, and the waves of beached garbage built-up on the dirty river bank that Quinlan's bloating, floating corpse becomes another piece of.

This is a film of paranoia, manifested in its propensity for long takes that connects the mendacity of its characters into a shared, anxious atmosphere: the view of a shoe box in a bathtub, like forensic evidence, minutes before it is planted with dynamite to frame a man for murder; tuxedoed police chiefs and attorneys gossiping about Vargas in a packed tin-can elevator while he takes the stairs. I was reminded of Polanski, whose filmography could be summed up by the title of this film.

Score: 4/5