Border noir II : Kansas City Confidential (1952)

Kansas City Confidential (1952); Associated Players and Producers presents; an Edward Small production; George Bruce, Harry Essex, writers; story by Harold R. Green and Rowland Brown; directed by Phil Karlson. With John Payne, Lee Van Cleef, Coleen Gray, Preston Foster, Neville Brand, Jack Elam, Dona Drake, Mario Siletti. Cinematography by George E. Diskant; art director, Edward L. Ilou; editor, Buddy Small; music, Paul Sawtell. Summary: An armored car robbery is pulled off and four robbers get away clean with 1.2 million in cash. However - a decorated and down on his luck veteran named Joe Rolfe is accused of being involved and is mercilessly grilled by the local police. Released, Joe plots his revenge of the thieves.



Kansas City Confidential isn't exactly border noir, in fact a lot of it isn’t really very noirish. But it’s a tasty little heist movie, and for me the best scenes, only a few minutes of footage alas, take place in that whipping boy of vice-ridden, danger-infested border towns, "the wickedest city in the world," Tijuana. Not the real Tijuana but a cleverly designed set of the type the studios did so well back in the day. In fact, this Tijuana - an irresistible haze of dimly lit back alleys, gambling parlors, neon lights and unsavory characters - seems more authentic and atmospheric than the real thing.

Anyway, the most noirish sequence may well be John Payne’s roughing up a sweaty and nervous Jack Elam in the seediest of hotel rooms. The scenes in Tijuana fly by far too fast, and before we know it, the movie changes gears and moves to a fictitious, and very unconvincing, resort setting, where, from a purely noir perspective, it’s far less interesting, though a fair amount of tension in the story is maintained.

KCC is virtually a textbook on how to fashion a classy B noir: cast, music, look, and direction are first-rate. Similar in tone and content to Asphalt Jungle of a couple of years prior, but not quite as good, KCC benefits from a cast of noir mainstays: tough guy hero-with-a-past John Payne; heist mastermind Preston Foster; good girl Coleen Gray; and perhaps best of all, quintessential baddies Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam and Neville Brand.  

 

style ***
substance ***

"Haven't I seen you somewhere before"

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.