Touch of Evil

Apparently, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil is an unappreciated masterpiece. I am not that sure. There are some masterful shots and excellent performances, but I found the plot to be a bit of a train wreck. It’s like watching the Los Angeles Lakers attempt to execute the Triangle these days, extremely skilled at times yet missing some basic fundamentals.

As usual, there was a dispute between Welles and the studio which led to the mangling of the original print. A DVD was released containing some of Welles’ requested changes, but it doesn’t surpass above average. Perhaps the film is an illustration of the importance of teamwork and how Welles would have gone much further had he been able to work well with others.

Touch of Evil also explores the battle between good and evil and how individuals from each side of the divide can be capable of acting like their counterparts, even if only briefly. A review described the film as partially a battle between the moralist and the pragmatist. Although some characters may act immorally, the actors’ performances still provoke the audience’s sympathy, an event that occurs to this day, even in real life.

Like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, Touch of Evil doesn’t match the its supposed potential. Both are excellent examples of the film noir genre but they demonstrate how superb ‘A’ talent doesn’t always succeed when it tries to make a great ‘B’ movie.

Reality Check

Stanley Kubrick died shortly after completing the final edit of Eyes Wide Shut, a modern adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle. Both analyze the juxtaposition of dreams and reality, the conscious and the sub-conscious, differently. Schnitzler’s work lacks the sexuality that smolders throughout Kubrick’s film but the written word offers a medium to communicate all of the protagonist’s thoughts - expressed and repressed desires, future plans and regrets - accurately depicting how he is no different from any other person.

Eyes Wide Shut delves into what is real and what is not. Is Bill’s sequence of unsuccessful sexual adventures more real than Alice’s fantasies? Did any of the experiences actually occur? Bill (or Schnitzler’s Fridolin) says: “no dream is just a dream”; to some degree the film is a two and a half hour grey area.

Kubrick utilizes several common elements, such as the telephone or the doorbell, to interrupt the tension at critical times, as if to portray how the morning always disrupts dreams. Whatever manifests itself overnight, the real world always continues unabated.

There is the question about where does one reveal their true self, which neither work truly exposes. If one mismanages a six-point lead and calls two timeouts at inopportune times, does that make them likely to do so in the real world? Where can one draw the line? According to Kubrick and Schnitzler, such a line can’t exist. At least the two end-outs diagrammed will work in either subconscious or conscious thought.

Fridolin devotes extensive time to second thoughts and hypotheses that Bill does not. He is possibly a more realistic character as a result of that reflection. In Citizen Kane, Bernstein tells Thompson about he woman that he briefly glimpsed on a ferry sixty years previously, yet he has not gone more than a month since without thinking about her. So what the subconscious decides to keep and discard to often an arbitrary question that nobody can answer.