Leaving this border town, don’t know where.
It has the most famous one-take tracking shot in cinema history, it’s the last of the official film noirs (unless you’re one of those Kiss Me Deadly purists), and it was directed by distinguished filmmaker Orson Welles. And if that isn’t enough, it’s actually a pretty good movie too. It was called Touch of Evil, and though it has its flaws, the technical prowess on display is indisputable. At this point film noir was a well-charted phenomenon in which Welles had already dabbled when he made Lady from Shanghai and The Stranger. This time out, he wanted to fully explore the possibilities of shadow the way a painter might explore the possibilities of oils. Everyone knew black-and-white was on the way out. Touch of Evil was Welles’ grand commentary on the style. He was showing the world what was possible, and by extension, what might be impossible using color.
The casting of Charlton Heston as Ramón Miguel Vargas has been thoroughly discussed pretty much everywhere one cares to look, so we don’t need to get into it except to say those criticisms are valid. However, the dual shortcomings of unauthentic accents and white men playing ethnic roles were still the norm in the late ’50s. Certainly, an actor such as, say, Ricardo Montalbán would have shone where Heston merely sufficed, but cinema simply mirrors the age in which it was produced. It’s okay to use our modern world as a prism through which to examine the circumstances around an old film, but it’s best do so respectfully, because somewhere in the future people with their own prisms will be looking upon our age, and it won’t look so good to them. Welles’ Touch of Evil is genius in any age, and it touched Sweden for the first time today in 1958.
Sweden,
Touch of Evil,
Lady from Shanghai,
The Stranger,
Orson Welles,
Charlton Heston,
Ricardo Montalbán,
film noir,
poster art,
cinema,
movie review 
