The Magic World of Orson Welles (32 page)

The contrast between the Mexicans and the Americans is made blatant by the passage of Rudy Linnaker's shiny convertible through the streets, impeded now and then by a traffic cop or a herd of goats. But midway through town the camera descends to street level, allowing the car to pass briefly out of sight while it picks up a walking couple (Heston and Leigh) who are
equally out of keeping with the environment. Handsome, well-tailored, they seem oblivious to the grotesque background and the time-bombed car that keeps drifting in and out of proximity. Before the shot is over we discover that they are representatives of the two countries whose borders meet here. Significantly, however, they come not from the border towns themselves, but from more prosperous worlds to the north and south. Each is confident and possessed of the right moral sensibilities, but as Susie Vargas remarks toward the end of the shot, this is the first time they've crossed a border together.

Vargas later tells his wife that Los Robles “isn't the real Mexico.” “All border towns bring out the worst in a country,” he says, and in the closing section of the film he emphasizes the difference between Susie's immaculate whiteness and the dark, garbage-laden streets of the town. She has to be taken away from this “filth,” he tells Menzies. Her name has to be kept “clean,
clean!
” But there is a closer link than Vargas ever admits between border towns and inlands, which are all part of the “real” country. The border is a zone where the latent corruption and sexual anxieties of the more respectable territories break through to the surface, just as it is a place where the economic exploitation of one country by another becomes more obvious. The dirty oil fields of Los Robles help produce the comforts of Philadelphia, and racial tension in one town has an effect on the unconscious life of another. Thus, immediately after Vargas tells Susie that border towns bring out the worst in a country, he remarks, “I can just see your mother's face if she saw our honeymoon hotel.” Here, and in various other places, Welles implies a symbolic connection between the Vargases' marriage and their presence on the border. They've “crossed over” into a sexual contact that, in Los Robles at least, is usually kept surreptitious. As a result, their security and complacency will be disrupted.

At the conclusion of the famous trucking shot that opens the film, Welles stresses the potential dangers of the Vargas marriage. The couple have just stepped into America, where they pause briefly and exchange affectionate words. The dark, handsome Mexican takes the voluptuous blonde into his arms, and their kiss is timed exactly with an explosion. The shot ends with a cut to a flaming auto dropping from midair, the camera zooming back slightly to convey the impact of the blast. The time bomb concealed beneath the street life of Los Robles therefore becomes not only an exciting way to open the melodrama but also a metaphor for the remaining action: it suggests apocalyptic forces ticking away under the street life of the border town, forces that have been ignited by the violation of a sexual taboo.

With the explosion of Linnaker's car, the film literally shatters into montage fragments. The plot, too, begins to segment as Vargas runs to the bomb site and his wife returns to the “safety” of their hotel. Welles photographs the aftermath of the explosion in a rapid series of tightly composed images that suggest chaos and bewilderment—little groups of players conversing in the darkness, or single heads isolated on the screen, twisted out of shape by the lens and lighted by flames. (The largest portion of the crowd is seen from the point of view of the dead man, in a low-angle shot that recalls the funeral in
The Magnificent Ambersons
.) During the next few moments, a parallel montage begins to set off the encounter between Vargas and Quinlan against Susie's journey through the raucous streets of Los Robles, where she immediately begins attracting sinister Mexican males.

From this point on,
Touch of Evil
begins shifting back and forth between the legal plot and the sexual plot, between Vargas's idealistic concern for justice and Susie's gradual descent into the Los Robles underworld. The two strands are woven together with considerable skill, producing a fine sense of emotional contrast and thematic interplay. In fact,
Touch of Evil
seems as much concerned with crossing narrative and visual paths as with crossing borders. In the opening shot, two couples move along the same streets, their routes intersecting but never quite touching; during the early scenes, the Grandis trail Mike and Susie everywhere they walk; at the close, Mike follows Quinlan and Menzies with a tape recorder, moving along a roughly parallel course through a maze of oil wells, barely missing discovery until the denouement. In
Kane
and
Ambersons
the cutting and the elaborate superimpositions had been designed to give the audience a sense of
now
versus
then
, but in
Touch of Evil
the same devices make us feel the importance of
here
versus
there
. The dark, cosmic humor of the film derives from a pattern of coincidence and juxtaposition within a limited time and space, the Vargases' narrow escape from an explosion being the first in a series of near misses: Linnaker's car almost blows up in Mexico; Quinlan almost succeeds in planting evidence against Sanchez; Vargas enters his hotel room a moment too late, just after his wife has been spotlighted by the Grandis; later, he drives right past Susie while her screams blend into street noises. Gradually, these accidents take on the same fatalistic tone one finds in
Kane
.

When Welles isn't using mobile, deep-focus shots to emphasize fateful mishaps and dual lines of action, he is editing so as to underline the ironies of his double plot. The most obvious example of this technique is in a cheesecake shot of Janet Leigh in her lingerie, where male viewers are given a chance to
indulge their voyeurism. Leigh reclines on the motel bed, her hair down to her shoulders, her body covered with luminescent silk. But the glamour and seductiveness of the image is disrupted when we cut to the frustrated Heston at the other end of the telephone line—a deep-focus composition with the pinched face of a blind woman in the foreground.

Figures 6.6–6.7: Phone conversation between Susie in the motel and Mike (overheard by a blind woman).

We've already seen a similar device in
The Lady from Shanghai
, but here it foreshadows many other, less ostentatious conjunctions—as when the door of the Mirador Motel slams on Susie's “rape” just as another door opens in the police hall of records. And when Welles uses a slow dissolve in the manner of his transitions in
Kane
, he gives the device a new richness and power, stressing thematic comparisons and contrasts. Consider three images that take us from one place to another (see
figs. 6.8
–
6.10
). Here the dissolve is not meant to indicate “time passing,” as it usually does, but rather the parallel between Menzies and Susie, both of them abandoned by a person they love. In the first shot Menzies watches Quinlan and Joe Grandi walking away toward a bar, their figures reflected in the window glass. Next, a dissolve shows a desert landscape superimposed on Menzies's face; as this new picture comes into view, Susie raises a window shade, her image appearing at the opposite side of the screen. The desert is revealed as a reflection in Susie's window and has been superimposed over both faces. Four separate images have been blended into a single transition, and the effect is heightened further by the soundtrack: in the first shot we hear distant church bells slowly ringing through the streets, but as Susie and the desert appear, the bells give way to noisy rock-and-roll from the motel speakers.

The opening scene of the film has initiated this elaborate parallelism and has also made the audience an anxious witness to a total picture of which no single character is aware. As soon as Linnaker and his female companion are blown up, we become aware of an impending sexual chaos that threatens to destroy the Vargas couple. At the very moment when Mike debates civil rights with Quinlan, Susie is being led by “Pancho” (as she calls him) to meet Uncle Joe Grandi, whose brother has recently been sent to prison by the Pan American Narcotics Commission. In a scene charged with equal portions of menace and grotesque comedy, Grandi threatens Susie with a gun, pokes a phallic cigar in her face, and then licks his lips as she exits—this last gesture a foreshadowing of the images that will precede and follow her “rape”: “Pancho” will lick his lips before attacking her, and she will wake from a drugged sleep to find Uncle Joe's head above her face, his dead tongue sticking out of his mouth.

Figures 6.8–6.10: A dissolve demonstrates the parallel between Menzies and Susie.

Figure 6.11: Susie's point of view when she awakes to the dead Uncle Joe hanging over her.

Throughout the early episodes Susie remains self-confident, her anger edged with a castrating wit. She tells “Pancho” that her husband, a “great big official,” is going to knock out his teeth, and when Uncle Joe pokes his cigar at her like Edward G. Robinson, she accuses him of playing “Little Caesar.” When she returns to her “honeymoon hotel” and finds the Grandi boys shining the beams of flashlights through her windows, she responds by throwing a light bulb at them. Nevertheless, the symbolic sexual violence mounts in intensity and is suggested even in her absence. For example, when a Grandi killer throws acid at Vargas, the chemical misses its target, sending a poster of Zita (Joi Lansing) up in smoke. The burning poster is an echo of the explosion we have just seen (as Stephen Heath remarks in his commentary on the film, Zita has literally become a “sizzling stripper”), but it is also an indication of what lies in store for Susie; both she and Zita are bosomy blondes, and we have just heard Quinlan describe them both as “Janes.”

During the remainder of the film, Mike and Susie Vargas live through the worst traumas of racist imaginings, becoming victims of Quinlan's bigotry, Uncle Joe's revenge, and the Grandi boys' desire to do violence against gringo
womanhood. Irony is piled upon irony as the many parallels in the plot give the characters a kind of displaced relationship, like figures in a dream. Susie, the white progressive who has married into the Mexico City bourgeoisie, spends her honeymoon being assaulted by a Los Robles dope pusher (as Heath has noted, he is played by an actor named Valentin de
Vargas
). Drugged and transported back to town, she is spread out on a seedy hotel bed, where she becomes a surrogate for Quinlan's wife, enabling him to act out the capture and strangulation of her “killer.” Quinlan himself, of course, becomes one of the murderers he hates. Mike Vargas, like Quinlan before him, has to suffer the debasement of his wife by a “mixture” of races (even sexes), and Susie has to endure a nightmare that might have come straight from her mother's darkest fears. Nearly all the boundaries between good and evil threaten to dissolve, although the film's moral argument remains clear.