Noir, as a genre, is deeply misunderstood. The common conception of noir is a black and white film from the 1930s about a hard-boiled private detective whose every step is accentuated with jazz music. Like all stereotypes, there's a nugget of truth, but in the aggregate it's way off base. While there are literary roots in noir that go back to the 19th century, and film roots in the German Expressionism of the 1920s, noir as a formal genre fully coalesced during World War II, when wartime rationing and blackout conditions meant filmmakers had to get creative. Additionally, as an artifact of noir being commonly conflated with the older genre of hardboiled detective fiction, which sometimes overlaps but is not the same, the stereotype suggests the typical noir hero was the archetypal private detective of the kind embodied in Raymond Chandler's Marlowe character, but this isn't totally accurate either. Noir heroes were typically gangsters with hearts of gold, dirty cops with a conscience, or just ordinary guys — writers, truckers, insurance agents — of varying moral turpitude who got in too deep. We can probably point to 1940's Stranger on the Third Floor as the starting line for the "golden age" of film noir; some might argue otherwise but they're wrong. But if you said that the end of that golden age, such as it might have ended, was marked by Orson Welles' groundbreaking 1958 film Touch of Evil, few people would seriously disagree.
Someone slips a time bomb into a car in Tijuana. The driver travels over the border into San Diego; his car soon explodes, killing him and his passenger. While the crime is considered to be San Diego's jurisdiction, Mexican special prosecutor Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston, in unfortunate brownface) gets involved with the investigation, rather quickly coming to disagreement with the lead investigator, veteran homicide detective Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles, using a combination of makeup and his own obesity to create a truly unpleasant character.) Quinlan has a long history of closing cases, but when Vargas begins to suspect that Quinlan planted evidence to frame a person of interest, he starts digging into Quinlan's old cases, unaware that Quinlan has teamed up with a local crime boss whom Vargas is building a case against to ruin Vargas.
For a film often billed as the last "classic" film noir, the film as Welles envisioned it was quite ahead of its time, often feeling more like a neo-noir from the New Hollywood era. Welles' career is marked by a drive to innovate; while the filmmaking tricks he used in Citizen Kane were mostly not new, nobody had ever put them all together so cohesively like that to create a particular atmosphere. It's a feat he would pull off again and again, which is why the theatrical cut of Touch of Evil is one of the worst cases of studio interference on a movie I've ever seen. (It's up there with the sci-fi noir Dark City, the theatrical cut of which tells the whole story in the first five minutes.) Editing of the film was taken away from Welles after he took too long working on it, and a few reshoots were done, all in the name of making the film more conventional; after screening a test version, Welles wrote a 58-page memo detailing what he thought the film needed to work. The version I saw was a restoration based on these notes, bringing it as close to Welles' original vision as possible. It was bold, experimental, and felt like a bridge between the "classic" noir era and the age of neo-noir. Its characters were larger than life (particularly Quinlan, literally and metaphorically) and its depiction of police corruption quite daring for the era. We're treated to cameos from Zsa Zsa Gabor and Marlene Dietrich; we get to watch Janet Leigh being menaced in a hotel (hmm...) and Welles playing one of the most monstrous figures of his career, worse even than the escaped Nazi he played in The Stranger. The film starts off zippy and takes on a breakneck pace, culminating in one of the darkest finales of the classic noir era. Good might have triumphed, but at what cost?
Touch of Evil may not be my favorite film noir. I think I tend to prefer the wartime classics over the more well-known 1950s films, despite the latter being rife with the cynicism and paranoia that so draws me to the cinema of the 1950s and early 60s. But it's nevertheless a masterpiece, one of Welles' best films. It's a must-have for any history of noir as a genre: as the US-Mexican border draws an arbitrary line between two cities more alike than you might think, so too does Touch of Evil form the border between the classic noir era and the films of an even darker future.
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