Touch of Evil, on Netflix

For film buffs who didn’t know: Orson Welles’s superb 1958 thriller Touch of Evil is on Netflix India now. The version they have is the original theatrical release, which Welles famously did not approve of (it was the last of his many skirmishes with the Hollywood studio system). The one I have on DVD (and the only one I have seen so far) is the 1998 re-cut by Walter Murch, working with the detailed, anguished memo Welles had sent the studio after watching a preview. I love the re-cut version, but I also look forward to watching the original studio version to see how it holds up, and whether it might not be more interesting in some ways. (As Welles himself noted, the absence of limitations is the enemy of art.) 
 
What I did watch on Netflix was the famous three-minute opening scene, a long, unbroken take that follows a car with a time-bomb in it across the US-Mexico border (while Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, as a just-married couple, leisurely saunter across the same route). Here, a couple of differences between the two versions are obvious: for example, in the original release, the opening credits play over the scene, which means a viewer might get careless. (I can imagine some viewers, back in 1958, settling into their seats with their popcorn, not paying much attention to Welles’s meticulously constructed shot because, well, WORDS are running across the screen, so the story proper can't have begun yet.) Whereas the Welles Memo version is without the credits and invites us to give the shot our full and uninterrupted attention.

Anyway, a couple of things to look out for if you haven’t yet seen this great film:

-- The influence on Psycho, which came two years later. Janet Leigh being terrorised in a motel… which is run by a twitchy young man (wonderfully played by Dennis Weaver who, to my eyes at least, resembles Anthony Perkins in a few long-shots. Welles paid a sort of return-tribute to Hitchcock a few years later by casting Perkins as Josef K in his 1962 version of The Trial)

-- Charlton Heston is an actor who many people find easy to dismiss today (all those grandstanding, larger-than-life roles in three-hour epics that were roundly mocked by fans of “personal cinema”), but Touch of Evil in my view contains one of his best, most neglected performances -- as an upright but conflicted and discriminated-against Mexican cop (and this just a year before Ben-Hur)

-- Marlene Dietrich and Welles sharing screen time! The 40-plus Mercedes McCambridge as a boyish punk in leather! Heaven

-- For Welles aficionados, the final scenes of this film might lead you to ask the philosophical question "When is a cane just a cane, as opposed to a C.Kane?"

P.S. a little more about Walter Murch and Touch of Evil in this post.

And here's Janet Leigh with two shifty motel-keepers in two desolate motels, two years apart!