Across my experiences with film noir, I’ve found that a lot of the best, most memorable ones are always the nastiest ones. The ones in which none of the characters have few or no redeeming qualities, in which bad things happen to them and you don’t care because you know they deserve it, but they’re such good characters and the rest of the movie is so good that you can’t take your eyes off the screen.
Look at Sunset Boulevard. Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond are rats of their own kind. Double Indemnity has a greedy man looking to get a dame and some money. No sympathy there. Sweet Smell of Success has two of the most memorable main villains in the history of cinema in J.J. Hunsecker and Sydney Falco. And must I mention the Killing? With an ending like that? Well, the same goes for Touch of Evil.
Touch of Evil may very well be one of the nastiest, most enjoyable film noirs I’ve ever seen, filled with claustrophobic settings, crimes around every literal and figurative corner, snappy dialogue, a wicked atmosphere, and, in Hank Quinlan, a deeply flawed, deeply ironic, and extremely corrupt villain. And Charlton Heston playing a Mexican, which may in fact be the greatest villainy of all.
On the Mexico-U.S. border, in a small, sleazy town, after the legendarily beautiful three minute tracking shot, a man and a woman’s car is blown up by a time bomb. You don’t care who they are, because right before and right after that, there are still rats all around this town, and things like this happen everyday anyway.
Who else is called in to solve this mystery except the veteran Quinlan (Orson Welles) and the new guy (Heston) to see who did it. Quinlan already has a guy pegged. Call it his intuition. But Heston sees something fishy in Quinlan, especially with evidence showing up at the culprits house when he didn’t see it there after a thorough search.
And this is the story of Touch of Evil, a battle of this terrible corruption by Quinlan, and his sick brand of justice and his obsessive way of cleaning things up by finding the most reliable fall guy to go down in the courts.
This atmospheric storytelling and this cast of disgusting characters populate the film and make it great, outshining all the flaws of useless characters and questionable sequences that fill the film.
All in all, this is the end of the film noir era, as many call it to be. There were some afterwards, but this is the film that supposedly ended the era and ushered in the neo-noirs. And what a way to end things too.
Great review
The Smoke Screen 