Mexico and the Blacklist. Postscript : A 'Touch' of the Red Scare. Part 1

 
Despite his rather well-known liberal political views, Orson Welles was never a victim of the Blacklist [1]. Though he had already been denounced as a Communist sympathizer by the Hearst press, the official targeting of Welles was hardly necessary, given his (more or less) self-imposed Hollywood exile during the Blacklist’s peak years of 1947 to 1957. Welles’s absence during these years might have been partially due to his discomfort with the prevailing tenor of the times, but the more likely explanation was his reputation for not playing the filmmaking game by the established Hollywood rules, his supposed transgressions being, among others, extravagance and unpredictability. The result was a paucity of directorial engagements. Thus Welles’s was a political sort of blacklisting, but not of the ideological kind.

Elsewhere in this blog we’ve discussed Touch of Evil as a prime example of border-noir, in particular focusing on its border/racial issues and the complexly textured character of Capt. Quinlan. In this posting we’ll consider Touch of Evil in the context of the Red Scare of the 1950s. The film indeed reeks of a malodorous if rather unfocused malevolence [2], created and sustained by its sounds, bumpy narrative, character grotesques, sleazy music, low rent settings, and murky – even by noirish standards – look.

More specifically, Touch of Evil is about – among other things – racism and American supremacism, and the corresponding haves and have-nots on both sides of the border. But it’s also about the police, police corruption, state terror and the abuse of official power, all themes that resonate within a McCarthy-esque gestalt in the film’s context of the 1950s.

On one level Evil can be read as a Red Scare parable where Quinlan and the entire ‘Los Robles’ police apparatus stand in for HUAC/McCarthy-like forces of official heavy-handedness, where the Mexicans, small time criminals, and otherwise powerless and marginalized individuals - for whom questionable associations and even suspicion of wrongdoing were tantamount to guilt - represent the victims of the Cold War’s most egregious paranoiac excesses. The apt setting is the phantasmagoric, border town universe of Los Robles, which nicely fills in as an extreme manifestation of American society in the 1950s. “If border towns do bring out the worst in countries, perhaps, then, they are metaphors for what those countries really are.” (Krueger, p. 57).

Filmed in 1957 and released the following year, Touch of Evil is often cited as the book-ending apotheosis of the noir era [3]. It’s also fair to think of the years 1957-1959, or thereabouts, as the unofficial end of the Blacklist. The late Fifties’ more progressive bent was further evidenced by the growing momentum of the Civil Rights movement. But perhaps most important, 1957 also witnessed the passing of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and it’s perhaps no accident that the character of Quinlan - scowling, unkempt, singularly un-photogenic - bears a strong metaphorical (and physical) resemblance to McCarthy.  
'Touch' of the Red Scare Part 2 here

Mexico and the Blacklist. Postscript : A 'Touch' of the Red Scare. Part 2

'Touch' of the Red Scare Part 1 here

   Thus, in Touch of Evil, a McCarthy-esque Quinlan bullies, accuses, cajoles and generally hogs the spotlight, but ultimately his fate is that of gradual self-destruction, and by the end of the film he has been duly pilloried and dispatched. And to be fair, the resemblance extends to Welles himself, as is witnessed by the frequent critical commentary on similarities between Welles and the Quinlan character [4]. This is underscored further in that the character of Quinlan, and  McCarthy, lacked the discipline, plodding methodology, and intellectual rigor for sustained and meaningful results; instead they relied on a few brilliant flourishes buttressed by theatrical bombast, half-baked intuition, and the convenient stage management of facts [5]. Both surrounded themselves with fawning toadies who would not dare question their brilliance, extending in Quinlan's case to even his nominal superiors. (As for Welles, the admirers continue to this day in the form of critics, academics, and other devotees).

   And to be sure, Evil's flawed hero Quinlan – warts and all in the form of his racial prejudice and physical repulsiveness – on a superficial level fits the stereotype of a Southern redneck sheriff. Indeed, In the Heat of the Night’s iconic good old boy sheriff of a decade later, played by Rod Steiger, might well have been based on the Hank Quinlan template. [Moreover, as a symbol of heavy-handed 1950s officialdom, Quinlan bears more than a passing resemblance to J. Edgar Hoover.]

  But on the other hand Quinlan is, disquietingly, a surprisingly sympathetic character, partially due to his prowess as a detective, but mostly for the fact that it’s his  methods which are objectionable, not his motivations or results. As a contrast we have his nemesis, the Mexican good cop Vargas, who despite his nobility and insistence on legal process, remains a curiously unlikable character, in part because of his self-righteousness, but also because his methods eventually descend to Quinlan-like levels of unsavoriness.

  These multilayered character touches are reminders that there are no easy interpretations or answers in Touch of Evil. Everything about it – especially its look and characters – are posited in innumerable shadings, creating a moral and physical universe that’s ambiguous at best and irretrievably corrupt at worst. With its uneasy synthesis of sordidness, redemption, corruption and compassion, and especially through its themes of border tensions, racial prejudice, and fear of the Other, Touch of Evil has an uncanny prescience, and continues to fascinate and resonate – and grow in popularity – in our own unquiet times.

[1] A counter point of view is provided by Joseph McBride’s What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? : a Portrait of an Independent Career [Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2006], which forcefully makes the case for Welles as victim of McCarthyism and the Blacklist, citing Welles’s genuine commitment to social causes in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the FBI files collected on Welles from 1941 to 1954.

[2] In this context we note Eric M. Krueger’s perspicacious analysis of Touch of Evil’s garbage and filth-infested motifs, as metaphor for the story’s all-pervasive corruption and decay (and perhaps as a metaphor for a touch of the Red Scare?). E. M. Krueger, “Touch of Evil : Style Expressing Content,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Autumn 1972), pp. 57-58.

[3] Kemp points out that it's no coincidence that the decline of the classic noir cycle follows closely on the fall of McCarthy. Philip Kemp, "From the Nightmare Factory: HUAC and the Politics of Noir," Sight & Sound v55, 1986, p270.

[4] By the late 1950s Welles was no longer the dapper figure of his Boy Wonder days. True, he had not quite descended to Quinlan-esque levels of bloated grotesqueness, but he was showing the first signs of the extreme overweight that would make him a self-caricature in his later years.

[5] It’s perhaps no accident that Welles, in additional to being a great director, was also a talented, near professional-caliber magician. Accordingly, there's a goodly amount of magic present in his directorial style, with more than it's share of sleight-of hand conjuring tricks.

Border noir I part 1

  "Think Hitchcock's Psycho with Chicana biker dykes, the desert, and pachucos, and you are ready for Welles's frontera Odyssey.” - William Anthony Nericcio, Tex[t]-Mex : seductive hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2007, p41.

“You people are touchy.”

   Touch of Evil is an irresistible, one-of-a-kind movie; it inspires so many thoughts and associations that there’s the inevitable impulse to want to write them all down. Alas, Touch of Evil is also, with the conspicuous exception of Citizen Kane, probably the most written-about Orson Welles film. Thus the embarrassing fate to offer my proverbial two cents’ worth. But I will, and I’ll do my best to be mercifully brief. Suffice to say that if there is indeed a cinematic subgenre we could call border noir, then present film is arguably the supreme example [1]. I’ll leave it to others to determine whether it’s the last film noir, the first post-noir, or first, albeit proto-, neo-noir.

   Time alters the way we see a movie, and Touch of Evil indeed improves with repeated viewings. My initial impressions of disjointedness and strangeness are a large part of the joys of subsequent viewings of the film. So are the almost caricature-like noir motifs which lard the proceedings: sinister back alleys; sleazy, smoke-infested night clubs; Spanish-deco architecture; flying trash; jagged staircases; dive hotels; off-kilter camera angles. Indeed, the border town universe of Touch of Evil might be seen as the Lady from Shanghai fun-house come to life for a couple of hours. Or as one critic so aptly expresses it : “Touch of Evil is a seedy experience.” [2]

   Looming over all is the malevolent, hulking presence of Capt. Hank Quinlan (played by Orson Welles). Brutal, physically repulsive, and more important, morally so, Quinlan is the type of cop who doesn’t hesitate to plant evidence in the cause of “aiding justice.” A rampant, unapologetic American supremacist [3], Quinlan carries with him an anti-Mexican bias that translates into a guilt-before-the-fact philosophy of law enforcement. Yes, Quinlan is a no-nonsense, realpolitik sort of cop. For him those starry-eyed idealists like Vargas (Charlton Heston) cause all the problems in the world (“they’re worse than crooks; you can always do something with a crook”).

   Yet what makes Quinlan fascinating is that he has several shadings of gray in his professional and personal character. To wit, there's the surprisingly sentimental side, along with a clever if nasty sense of humor. In one scene he reminisces wistfully with brothel madam and former girlfriend Tana about better days as schmaltzy, ersatz Mexican piano music wafts in the background. And for someone who sits atop the power structure, Quinlan has little flair for, even patience with, politics; he chides his nominal bosses, the D.A. and police chief, for their tuxedoed garb which they wear to a steakhouse dinner, which Quinlan, ever the detective, quickly divines is a political event.

   But if Quinlan isn't exactly a heroically tragic figure (then again, maybe he is!), he’s nonetheless deserving of some sympathy from the audience [4]. In his own twisted way Quinlan has a sense of professional integrity. He pushes himself to and beyond his physical limits. And he reminds us that he never framed anyone who wasn’t already guilty. Perhaps even more important, he never personally profited from his work as a policeman, with only a small turkey ranch to show for his 30 years of dutifully taking on the dirtiest jobs. Most of all, Quinlan attaches a highly personal, moralistic righteousness to his work; his capturing criminals is a revenge-laced atonement for the unpunished murder of his wife decades prior. The one silver lining for him in his sordid world is a certain police celebrity status. All in all, one of cinema’s great villains, with a touch of the hero.

Border Nor I Part 2 here   

Border noir I part 2

Border Noir I Part 1 here

The movie’s better.

Originally published in 1956 and written by Robert Wade and William Miller under the pseudonym of "Whit Masterson," Badge of Evil was the original title of the novel that was to become the movie Touch of Evil. These days the book is periodically reissued under the film’s title. Upon reading the book my reaction was: it’s ok, a competent if bland detective story, but no Touch of Evil.

  There are numerous differences between the book and the film, mostly of characters, emphasis and setting. There’s no Vargas in the novel; the book’s main protagonist is a Vargas-like assistant district attorney named Holt, who has a Mexican (albeit thoroughly Americanized) wife. There’s no Sgt. Menzies; the film collapses the characters of McCoy and “Sgt.” Quinlan into the single character of Capt. Quinlan. The unnamed, rather Santa Monica-like Southern California setting of the novel is transmogrified in the film into an über-border town of irresistible sleaziness and decay.

Most important, the book lacks the poetry and atmosphere of Welles’s film, specifically the Mexican-ness, border tensions, and racially-charged edginess which overlay almost every scene. But bottom line: the movie, with its special alchemy by way of Welles’s magic ‘touch’, transforms a conventional crime thriller into a phantasmagorical, and unforgettable, work of art.

 Despite all the technical razzle-dazzle and convoluted plot, Touch of Evil is at heart a character study, specifically of two characters: the somewhat one-dimensional Vargas and the more complexly textured Quinlan. And if the particular vehicle for the character study is tragedy, then the true tragic figure is not the obvious choice of Quinlan, who has already, self-accommodatingly, sunk to his own moral and ethical heart of darkness, but rather, the by-the-book Vargas, who little by little compromises his professional ethics, eventually employing Quinlan-like methods of aiding justice in pursuit of an ostensible, and probably illusory, greater good.

Contributing in no small part to our identification with the Quinlan character is the uncanny similarity to Welles himself. Thus the bloated visage of Quinlan is a metaphor for the spectacular ruin of Welles's career. And Capt. Quinlan’s relationship to the city parallels Welles’s own outsider, quasi washed-up status in a depraved, indifferent film industry in the late 1950s. Moreover, Quinlan’s previously referenced distaste for politics is mirrored by Welles’ own conspicuous ineptitude in film industry politics.

But, in a classic case of Wellesian one-upmanship, it seems that the wily director may have had the last laugh after all. In particular, by way of the 1998 restoration (which incorporates a goodly amount of Welles’s suggestions in his famous 58-page memo), the artistic vision of Welles the auteur - even from beyond the grave and a half century later - has, at least to some extent, prevailed over philistinic studio interference. Thus, the mythology of Welles as misunderstood genius only continues to grow over the years.

style ****
substance ****

Further reading: Frank Brady, Citizen Welles : a Biography of Orson Welles, N. Y., New York, Scribner, 1989, pp. 496-511; Danny Peary, Cult Movies 3, N. Y., Simon & Schuster, 1988, pp. 255-260; “Touch of Evil” : Crossing the Line; “Hallucinations of Miscegenation and Murder: Dancing along the Mestiza/o Borders of Proto-Chicana/o Cinema with Orson Welles's Touch of Evil," in : William Anthony Nericcio, Tex[t]-Mex : Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2007, pp. 39-80; Benjamin Paquttte, Touch of Evil: A Cognitivist Approach; Brooke Rollins, “Some Kind of a Man : Orson Welles as Touch of Evil’s Masculine Auteur,” Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film & Television, Spring2006, Issue 57, pp. 32-41.

[1] For more on border noir see: Dominique Brégent-Heald, "Dark Limbo : Film Noir and the North American Borders," Journal of American Culture, v29 n2, pp. 125-138.

[2] Eric M. Krueger, “Touch of Evil: Style Expressing Content,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), p. 57.

[3] In Quinlan's calculus, American invariably equates to White, as opposed to Mexican, different, or otherwise foreign (i.e. brown-skinned). Thus his nationalistic bias has a pungently racist element to it.


[4] Sympathetic or not, by the end of the film the character of Quinlan isn’t redeemed in any sense – in fact he has become progressively more vile and ruthless. To be sure, there’s the minor bone tossed his way with Sanchez's confession which confirms his repute as a detective. The really nice twist, however, is that it’s the squeaky clean Vargas who’s ultimately dragged down to Quinlan’s level, literally, as he meanders through the sewer-like, oil-drenched waters trying to collect surreptitiously obtained evidence to, in effect, frame Quinlan.