The Magic World of Orson Welles (31 page)

Figures 6.1–6.2: Quinlan in the bordello.

The contrast between Tanya's rooms and the city of Los Robles is emphasized when Quinlan stands in the streets, munching a candy bar, and is captivated by the sound of a pianola, while in the distance Adair bids reluctant farewell to the more modern prostitutes of the Rancho Grande. A moment later Quinlan steps dreamily onto Tanya's veranda, drawn toward her parlor as rubbish blows past an oil derrick behind his head. Inside, however, Tanya's rooms create the same ironies as Kane's snowy paperweight, and the emotional power of the scene rises out of a tension in the mise-en-scène between romance and cynicism. Tanya herself is both mother and whore, both mystic and cynical realist, whereas Quinlan seems to have stepped into an ironic childhood. In the two pictures here (see
figs. 6.1
and
6.2
), for example, he is first shown eating candy the way a child sucks his thumb; he is then seen drowsing amid Victorian bric-a-brac, stuffed animals, and the bullfight memorabilia of Welles's own adolescence, all of it thrown together like a junk shop. The effect of these bordello scenes is both funny and sad, especially in the way the present keeps intruding on the past: Quinlan is so aged and fat that Tanya doesn't recognize him; a television set is perched atop the pianola; and even the music of Henry Mancini is synthetically sweet, perfectly
appropriate to a place where everything has become “so old it's new.” But while the imagery creates an impressive poetry, the plot drives forward on its melodramatic path. In one shot (omitted in the original release) Quinlan sees the figure of Vargas moving ghostlike outside Tanya's windows. Welles's symbolism is clear: Quinlan is compared to the noble bull above his head, prepared for the kill by banderillas; meanwhile Vargas, whose reflection we see in the mirror at the extreme lower left, is compared to the matador's photograph on the wall. In his drunkenness Quinlan assumes that Vargas is a dream, even though it has become obvious, as Tanya says to him in her fortune-teller's voice, that his “future is all used up.” Desperately, he avoids the consequences of his acts until the end of the movie, when he shoots Menzies and tries vainly to wash the blood off his hands.

In contrast to this fascinating villain, Mike Vargas is the nominal hero of the film and the bearer of Welles's own political viewpoint. As Charlton Heston has remarked, he is mainly a “witness” to Quinlan's fall, but he remains an admirable figure, torn between his sense of justice and his love for
his wife. Heston gives a remarkably believable, un-stereotyped portrayal of a Mexican (“he sure don't talk like one,” Quinlan says), and because of his strength and virility he becomes the most satisfying of all the antagonists to Welles's tyrants. For all his virtues, however, Mike Vargas is not supposed to be a spotless bearer of the truth. He is a shade too privileged and stiff, so preoccupied with his role as chief of the “Pan American Narcotics Commission” that he actually puts his wife in danger. There is in fact a twisted comedy in the way his job keeps taking him away from his highly sexual mate, so that most viewers regard him as excessively pure. Even when he confronts Quinlan with a ringing statement of the film's thesis (“a policeman's job is only easy in a police state”), Welles deliberately undercuts the power of his line by the way the scene is framed. Quinlan and Vargas are photographed in a tight close-up, facing each other at either side of the screen; as Vargas speaks the important words, Quinlan turns his head slowly toward the camera, his eyes rolling in wonderfully comic derision, commenting on Vargas's self-importance and rhetoric.

Figures 6.3: Quinlan, compared to a bull, senses Vargas, compared to a matador.

In contrast to Quinlan, who is usually shown from low, portentous angles, Vargas is photographed with wide-angle tracking shots that express the anger, intensity, and sexual frustration behind his cool exterior. But in the later part of the film, his reserve breaks and he is forced to imitate his enemy. When Vargas's wife is attacked, he becomes “a husband now, not a cop”; when he bashes a hoodlum's head into the glass arch of a jukebox, he echoes the scene where Quinlan forces Joe Grandi's head through an identical arch in a transom; when he grabs a thug by the neck and carries him the full length of a bar, he makes us recall the scene where Quinlan strangles Grandi by lifting him off the floor; finally, he and Menzies entrap Quinlan with a bugging device, and Vargas confesses (in another shot cut from the original release) that his ethics have been compromised. “I hate this machine,” he says, but he continues to work out his revenge, insisting that the unmasking of Quinlan is his duty, just as Quinlan has assumed that the destruction of killers is his own “dirty job.”

Despite this experience, Vargas never acquires the tortured soul of a Quinlan or a Menzies, who have a more intimate acquaintance with rattiness, sin, and guilt. Perhaps that is why, in the contrast between the chief antagonists,
Touch of Evil
creates an effect vaguely similar to Graham Greene's thrillers—especially to a novel like
Brighton Rock
, where the author's vision of a moral wasteland is contrasted to the simple “right and wrong” of liberal humanism. Welles even evoked Greene for comparison when he began working on the
film: “Greene,” he said, “is concerned with the plight of the soul. This is about the plight of the citizen.” Moreover, in occasionally transcending legalities to emphasize time and the inevitability of death,
Touch of Evil
echoes another famous crime novelist. At the end of the film, two characters—the D.A.'s man Schwartz (Mort Mills) and the prostitute Tanya—stand looking down at Quinlan's body, which has fallen into the shallows of an oily river. Schwartz, who is something of a cool opportunist, remarks that Quinlan was a “good detective.” Tanya adds that he was a “lousy cop” and is given the last, most fundamental comment: “What does it matter what you say about people?” she asks, her words and the imagery matching almost exactly the elegiac sentiments in the last paragraph of Raymond Chandler's
The Big Sleep
:

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.

But these references to the “human condition” do not fully account for the power of
Touch of Evil
. At some point one needs to deal with the kinky, beautifully lascivious qualities of the movie—with what I've already called its pulpy surface. And here one inevitably talks more about the female characters than about the males. For if the males are vehicles for moral argument, the females are presented largely as objects of sexual fantasy and are the deepest reasons for the superstructure of legal forms and rules that are guarded by the police.

Like
Psycho
, a film it probably influenced,
Touch of Evil
uses the sexual charms of Janet Leigh for all they are worth, dressing her in silken undies, making her the victim of assault in a motel. At the other extreme from her, of course, is Dietrich, and together these two embody all the stereotypes of female sexuality in popular art. We don't immediately recognize them as a basis for the film's emotional energy, because Tanya is extraneous to the plot and is brought into conjunction with Susie Vargas only twice: first when Welles cuts from the attack on Susie to a brief scene in Tanya's bordello, and then at the conclusion, when Tanya crosses in front of the Vargas auto as Mike and Susie are embracing—“Mike,” Susie cries, and almost simultaneously Tanya shouts, “Hank!” Once they are set together, their importance as a pair becomes obvious.

Figures 6.4–6.5: Female sexuality in
Touch of Evil
: Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh) and Tanya (Marlene Dietrich).

Together the two women are perfect examples of the fair lady/dark lady imagery that runs throughout American literature and Hollywood cinema, an imagery that has always suggested latent tensions of race and social class as well as the underlying American ambivalence about “wildness” versus domesticity. Hence they are in exact visual contrast: one is blonde and youthfully voluptuous, the other is dark and ageless; one is spunky, rational, and naïve, the other is mysterious and world-weary; one is a wife, the other a prostitute. Between them they account for the film's radical shifts of mood, its movement between violence and quiet, between the rock-and-roll sounds piped through a motel intercom and the wistful melodies of a whorehouse pianola.

In
Touch of Evil
this vision of womanhood is used in an ironic, or at least highly self-conscious, way because one of the obvious aims of the film is to explore the sexual psychology of race hatred. And here, as in the law/police theme, Welles manages to raise social issues while avoiding the trap of rhetoric; he also takes considerable risks, dealing with the most lurid fantasy material without becoming simply opportunistic. To appreciate his success, one must observe the degree to which the film has been made to represent an unstable borderland—an actual border between the United States and Mexico, a social border between whites and Latins, and an even more volatile psychological border between civilization and the libido. Hence the legal, social, and sexual issues are intertwined, as they are in life, and the conflict between Vargas and Quinlan takes place against a background of sexual relations between the races. Marcia Linnaker has been having an affair with a Mexican shoe clerk; Vargas is insecure about the impression Mexico has made upon his blonde, Philadelphia-born wife; Quinlan says that years previously his own wife was strangled by a “half-breed” (even though he now crosses the border to take refuge with a Mexican prostitute); and in the most disturbing scenes of the film, Susie Vargas is made to believe she has been raped by the greasy-haired, leather-jacketed Grandi gang. The whole movie, to borrow one of Joseph Cotten's lines, is a “mixed party” (an old Southern expression referring to a sex party with a mixture of races).

Perhaps the central importance of this theme will become more apparent if we examine a locus classicus: the opening shot. “It's in all the books,” an interviewer once told Charlton Heston, but it is worth further analysis. One of the most spectacular moments in Welles's career, it is also functional, establishing the “world” of the film and revealing the social and sexual tensions that underlie the story.

The shot begins with a close-up of hands setting a time bomb, accompanied by Henry Mancini's bongos and the sound of a prostitute's laughter echoing down half-empty streets. It ends, about two minutes and fifteen seconds later, as Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh kiss and we hear the sound of an explosion. In between, the camera executes a complex and beautiful tracking movement, rushing after the bomber as he plants the explosive in the trunk of a convertible; rising in the sky as a couple enter the car; arching over dark roofs and neon signs as the loaded vehicle drives out to the street; then drifting backward ahead of the car to present gradually the town of Los Robles—a type of sin city that the better Hollywood thrillers have always created with ease but that Welles has given a special intensity and visual wit.

Universal printed credits over part of the shot and scored it with a Mancini theme—one of the relatively few times when music originates from something other than a “natural” dramatic source. Despite the changes, however, Welles's skill is obvious, his vision of Los Robles at once more stylized and more specific than the usual studio expressionism. The extreme wide-angle lens opens out space at either side of the screen, giving forward or backward movement a preternatural effect; cars and figures on the street below are blocked in discernible patterns, crossing at diagonals in the near foreground like players on an ever expanding stage set. Los Robles does not resemble actual places like Tijuana or Matamoros (it is in fact Venice, California, exploited for its pseudo-Venetian architecture, its aging oil wells, and its general decay), yet it is quite true to the essence of border towns. On the streets we see strip joints and prostitution, a few ragged Mexican poor, and a couple of men trundling fantastic pushcarts. Most of the crowd is made up of tourists, chiefly American servicemen and workers in hardhats who are pumping oil out of the land. The town seems not to have prospered much from this industry; clearly it exists by selling vice to the Yankees, functioning as a kind of subconscious for Northerners, a night world just outside their own boundaries where they can enjoy themselves even while they imagine the Mexicans are less civilized. (In fact the most corrupt places in Los Robles—the Rancho Grande and the Ritz Hotel—are owned by a man who keeps insisting he is an “American citizen.”)