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the simply sedate to the By 1958, when Touch of Evil was released, the movie-going public had been thoroughly saturated with film noir themes and visual style. If yet another noir feature was to be produced with major Hollywood talent, it had to stand out from the sordid "B" pictures that latter-day films noir had become.
Not content to have the style simply serve the story, Welles overwhelmed his slight tale with self-consciously bold and daring cinematic excess. Because of this, Touch of Evil is aligned more with contemporary neo-noir efforts that archly re-create classic noir visual styles and themes than it ever was with the film widely credited for beginning the cycle: John Huston's The Maltese Falcon. As with any genre, the trademark visual style and peculiar motifs of film noir took time to develop. In Huston's Falcon, the distinctive mise en scene of noir had yet to take shape. There were the occasional low angles and Expressionistic lighting, but this was a film shot almost entirely on the Warner Brothers lot employing an accepted visual style developed over the previous decades of studio filmmaking. In addition, the themes of Falcon and other early-genre pictures revolved around alienated yet essentially moral private investigators or average Joes who were sucked into a quagmire of jeopardy and danger by duplicitous women. This world was dark yet it was still objective, and there were still some rules to the realm. Throughout his search for the black bird, the Huston/Bogart Sam Spade keeps his moral code planted firmly front and center. By the late 1950s, sucked into the moral vacuum created by such films as the nuclear-powered Kiss Me Deadly (1955) as well as by Touch of Evil, the night world of noir had grown much darker, more menacing, unbalanced. Self-serving, greedy private eyes and corrupt rogue cops now inhabited the dank caverns of the collective social conscience where before only debased criminals and scheming, deadly females had lurked. Instead of tracking down the killer of his partner as Spade did in Falcon, Evil's Hank Quinlan simply blows his away. By the end of the noir cycle, there was no safe place. There was no one who could be trusted, least of all the symbols of law and order. Danger and duplicity lurked inside every shadow, and "the stuff that dreams are made of" had become a corrupt, homicidal cop flopping down into a trash-filled sewer. With Touch of Evil, often considered the genre's epitaph, film noir went out in a cold blaze of harsh cynicism and garish neon, but not necessarily glory. Copyright © 2003 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |
