By: Kiara Walker
On honeymoon with his new bride, Susan ,Janet Leigh, Mexican-born policeman Mike Vargas ,Charlton Heston, agrees to investigate a bomb explosion. In so doing, he incurs the wrath of local police chief Hank Quinlan ,Welles, a corrupt, bullying behemoth with a perfect arrest record. Vargas suspects that Quinlan has planted evidence to win his past convictions, and he isn't about to let the suspect in the current case be railroaded. Quinlan, whose obsession with his own brand of justice is motivated by the long-ago murder of his wife, is equally determined to get Vargas out of his hair, and he makes a deal with local crime boss Uncle Joe Grandi ,Akim Tamiroff, to frame Susan on a drug rap, leading to one of the movie's many truly harrowing sequences. Touch of Evil dissects the nature of good and evil in a hallucinatory, nightmarish ambience, helped by the shadow-laden cinematography of Russell Metty and by the cast, which, along with Tamiroff and Welles includes Charlton Heston as a Mexican; Marlene Dietrich, in a brunette wig, as a brittle madam who delivers the movie's unforgettable closing words; Mercedes McCambridge as a junkie; and Dennis Weaver as a tremulous motel clerk.
In Touch of Evil, the play of shot and countershot, of dialogue and ambient sound, seem glutted by some strange weariness, the film’s motives and events and meanings clouded by ambiguity. The movie contains a single-take tracking shot of such elegance and skill. In the scene where they were in the apartment of young Manolo Sanchez, the chief suspect in the bombing of an American diplomat in a Mexican border town. It features, inter alia, Sanchez himself ,Victor Millan, local police chief Hank Quinlan ,Welles, and Mexican narcotics officer Miguel “Mike” Vargas ,Charlton Heston. The camera, pinned in short focus, drifts slowly from the front room to the bathroom and back again twice, making sure to verify that there is no-one else in the apartment and no way in or out save for the front door—how it lingers on the empty shoebox Vargas replaces on the shelf, a shoebox which will later be found to contain two sticks of dynamite.
Quinlan then plant the evidence to frame Sanchez. This can occur, and simultaneously exposing a tense, bilingual interrogation sequence as Vargas tries vainly to mitigate Quinlan’s aggression towards the boy. It has the intellectual power and emotional intensity that only writing and camerawork of such subtlety can provide and in its single take, the restitution of the entirety of the action within its own space and time.
Overall , I would rate this move an A. It had a great motive to it and kept the viewers entertain.
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