Review - Touch of Evil

I've had a really hard time watching Touch of Evil in the past. Getting past the whole Charlton Heston is playing a Mexican thing is just... it's a big barrier. He's so ridiculously bad. I mean, he was always bad, but in the other films of his I've seen his badness worked, because the film played off his campiness or the film itself was campy. His badness made Planet of the Apes, for example. And everyone's just being the acting equivilent of Cheez Wiz in The Ten Commandments (gotta love Anne Baxter and the way she wrings her lines into serpentine bliss).

But, besides the virtuoso opening sequence of Touch of Evil, which takes Hitchcock's theory of a bomb under the table and puts it to use in a car trunk, I've just never been able to sit still and watch the film, because his brownface and "acting" were just too much to bear. It doesn't help that the first quarter of the film is filler, all set-up, and nothing seems to happen. We get Orson Welles walking around begging for a doughnut, and some amazing lighting set-ups, and Janet Leigh stooping to Charlton's level of acting... but slogging through this portion last night, about a third of the way in, the film starts getting great, and the last two-thirds make it, for me, the classic everyone says it's supposed to be.

Once the film goes pitch black in tone, with the apparent (and suprisingly graphic in set up) rape of Leigh and her drugging with heroin and Orson's dirty tricks and murder spree... the film earns all the praise it's gotten. At some point even Charlton's presence begins to make sense, as the futile whiner amongst greater evils than he can bear.

The film certainly is beautiful the entire way through, with the stark black and white photography making the desert bordertowns nothing but black sky and endless white sand. The lighting and camera angles are wonderfully arranged, as if the white flickering of hell flames are coming up from beneath.

But God... why was Charlton Heston a star? I decided last night that he was simply fantastic at choosing the films he'd work on, that he had a great instinct for what would work, what people wanted to see. Because he is so, so terrible an actor. So bad. Boyfriend commented that Burt Lancaster would've made a much better Charlton Heston, and I think he's on to something. Burt had the chops and the same tall sharp physicality; Charlton just had the luck.