Touch of Evil

Some film noirs were box office bombs and critical flops when released, only to be resurrected and acclaimed by the next generation. No movie fits that bill better than Orsen Wells’ 1958 tour de force.

In a corrupt Mexican American border town, narcotics officer Mike Vargas investigates a car bombing and clashes with crooked police captain Hank Quinlan. As Quinlan plants evidence to secure convictions, Vargas exposes his corruption while his own wife becomes a target.

It’s worth the price of admission just to watch this cast in action: Orson Wells, Charlton Heston, Marlene Dietrich, Janet Leigh, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Joseph Cotton, Mercedes McCambridge, and Dennis Weaver. An added attraction is an original musical score by Henry Mancini that blends Afro-Cuban percussion, Tijuana jazz jive, and rock-and-roll-flavored jump blues. It marked Mancini's first major movie soundtrack album. 

According to conventional wisdom, the last “classic” film noir picture show is Touch of Evil. Then descends a limbo where films here and there try to capture the tone and substance of the great years, but that Hollywood milieu is gone, along with the public appetite. As the 1970s grow more chaotic and violent, there is a revival of the genre, and thus began a neo-noir era that still resonates today. Some commentators use The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958) as official bookends for the “classical” period of American noir. One critic calls it "close to the pinnacle of film noir.”

Note: In 1958, Touch of Evil was awarded the Grand Prize and the International Critics Prize at the Brussels World Film Festival, despite an effort by Universal Pictures to keep the film from competition.  Did Europeans know something about American films that Americans did not?