The recent, ongoing Barbenheimer phenomenon has been a shock for regular moviegoers, since we’ve long gotten used to having vast, empty multiplexes to ourselves, like rats making nests in abandoned hospitals.  The “Think pink!” Barbie army was out en masse on Barbenheimer Weekend, which was healthy for local cinemas’ survival in a post-streaming world and for our own generally anti-social routine of silently watching screens glow, alone in the dark.  This us-vs-them dichotomy was especially vivid to me on that Sunday morning, when I watched Orson Welles’s classic-period noir Touch of Evil at The Prytania.  The century-old single screener’s “Classic Movies” series is the only recurring repertory program in town where you can regularly see gems like Touch of Evil in a proper venue (give or take Prytania’s other, artier weekly rep series, Wildwood).  It’s also the only theater in town that was screening Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on a 70mm film print instead of a standard DCP, which means that a huge crowd of Oppieheads formed in the lobby during the final third of Touch of Evil, increasingly impatient with the opening film’s lengthy runtime.  I’m sure there were a few brave cinema soldiers who watched Touch of Evil and Oppenheimer as a back-to-back double feature that morning, since all-day double features were the commanding theme of the weekend.  Most of the people outside the theater walls likely hadn’t been to a movie since last year’s Top Gun & Avatar sequels, though, judging by the fact that there usually isn’t a line stretching all the way down the block outside The Prytania on Sunday mornings as I make my quick, anti-social exits to my bus stop.  It’s the Barbies & Oppies that allow theaters to stay open for those lesser-attended (but infinitely more precious) Classic Movies screenings, though, so in a way that block-long line out the door warmed my heart even more than watching another Old Hollywood relic in the Renet Brunet Classic Movie slot.

As you can tell by the title, Touch of Evil isn’t much of a heartwarmer anyway.  Welles’s major-studio noir is a shockingly grim & grimy crime picture; it’s also shockingly gorgeous.  It opens with a minutes-long, spectacularly complex tracking shot that follows two unsuspecting couples crossing into America from a Mexican border town, unaware that a bomb has been planted in the trunk of one couple’s car.  It’s a perfect illustration of the Hitchcock method of building suspense, showing the audience “the bomb under the table” long before the characters it threatens are aware of it.  That back-alley bombing is also a great source of political intrigue, leading to a feature-length investigation of the whos, wheres, whens, and whys behind the dynamite.  The detective from the Mexican side of the border is played by Charlton Heston (in a queasily outdated choice of cross-racial casting) as a noble, idealistic rule-follower who believes in the sanctity of the law.  The corrupt cop from the American side is played by Welles himself, matching the immense beauty of his camera work with his immense hideousness as a crooked, racist villain who frames young Mexican men for crimes they obviously did not commit.  In the movie’s view of law enforcement, all cops are bastards, but American cops are the slimiest, most repulsive bastards of all – something Welles conveys in the prophetic prosthetics that exaggerate his own facial features (by guessing exactly what his real-life face would eventually become) and in the exaggerated camera angles that frame that face at monstrous angles in sweaty close-ups.  His villainy really goes overboard when he attacks Heston for the transgression of actually following the law by dispatching drug-cartel biker boys to torment the detective’s naive, newlywed wife – a young Janet Leigh, who hadn’t yet learned from Norman Bates to beware handsome creeps at remote motels.  The whole picture is slimy & ugly in its heart, but stunningly beautiful to the eye.

Like every other Orson Welles picture after Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil suffers from discord between its director and its studio.  The version presented at The Prytania was the one most widely available to modern audiences: a digital restoration of a 1998 re-edit that attempted to reconstruct the film according to an Orson Welles memo to the execs at Universal, detailing how he would like to see it sequenced.  Touch of Evil had a much less prestigious reputation before that late-90s re-issue, since the studio butchered Welles’s vision in the editing room, leaving it just as much of a tattered mess as other notoriously muddled works like The Magnificent Ambersons.  The familiar tropes & rhythms of noir are a useful anchor for Welles’s studio-compromised fragments of genius, though, which you won’t find in Ambersons but is apparent in both Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai.  In the memo-corrected edit, there’s still some initial confusion about what action is set on which side of the border, but it feels like a small concern if you allow yourself to get swept up in the flow of the overachieving camerawork and in the jurisdictional clashes between the two nations’ police.  Thankfully, the Welles memo at least helped re-establish in the current edit that Heston’s investigation of American corruption should be intercut with the harassment & drugging of his wife, whom he’s essentially abandoned so he can play hero.  There’s incredible tension in watching this detective fall further down the rabbit hole while leaving ample time for the vultures outside to pick at his family, which I assume was lost in the initial edit that separated their stories as distinct & sequential rather than rottenly concurrent.  There’s still plenty space for smaller, less expected touches in the current tight-noir edit, though, most notably in Marlene Dietrich & Zsa Zsa Gabor’s small roles as border-town sex workers and in Welles’s own onscreen character-choice grotesqueries.

I didn’t walk out of The Prytania into the Sunday afternoon sunshine feeling “good”, exactly, even if it’s always a treat to watch such a formidable Old Hollywood classic for the first time on a proper screen.  There’s plenty to feel queasy about in Touch of Evil beyond Heston’s “respectful” brownface performance and the ogling of Leigh’s writhing, incapacitated body.  Welles leans into the downbeat misery of noir pretty hard here, the same way he leans into his camera’s extreme Dutch angles.  The movie’s not supposed to leave you feeling good about the American “justice” system, an effect Welles ensured would come across by playing the ugly, sweaty face of that system himself.  So, I desperately needed the little pick-me-up of seeing a huge crowd gather outside to watch Oppenheimer (another massive downer) on 70mm: a sign that The Movies aren’t fully dead yet, and that I’ll get to see a projection of some other butchered-by-the-studio Orson Welles picture in the future, thanks to the real money-makers like Barbenheimer.  

-Brandon Ledet