听 Honeymooning with American wife Susan (Janet Leigh) in the frontier town of Los Robles, Mexican special narcotics investigator Mike Vargas (Heston) finds business interrupting pleasure when a car bomb kills the town's boss. Required to investigate, Vargas finds himself up against Hank Quinlan (Welles), a local detective with a reputation for getting his man by fair means or foul. Resentful of Vargas' authority in the case, Quinlan decides to tamper with evidence to ensure that a perpetrator is found. What's more, Quinlan leans on local racketeer Joe Grandi, to ensure that Mike and Susan's stay in Los Robles is a most unpleasant one.
Orson Welles' glorious - if temporary - return to the Hollywood fray after years of studio neglect is one of his richest and most rewarding pictures. Adapted by Welles himself, from a shelved Paul Monash script based on a minor novel by Whit Masterson (which Welles famously never read), it's a supremely confident and stylish work. From the legendary opening tracking shot - still technically mesmerising - Russell Metty's black and white photography creates a strange chiaroscuro, noir landscape (though a straggler of the genre, the film stands as one of its finest entries) in which quintessential Wellesian themes of evil, corruption, and moral ambiguity loom large.
A fine cast more than match the coruscating material: Heston, untypically restrained in Mexican garb strikes the right note of outrage in the face of judicial perversion and there is fine support not only from Janet Leigh but strong contributions from Dietrich, a young Dennis Weaver, and Joseph Celleia as Quinlan's devoted partner. Welles however towers over the proceedings, on-screen and off. His Quinlan is a grotesque, hauntingly recognisable creation, embittered by the past and forever doomed to seek former glories. Masterful.
"Touch of Evil" is on at 11.55pm, 大象传媒2, Sunday 17th December 2000.
