Touch of Evil (1958)

Australian Premiere - 4K Restoration

“Touch of Evil is one of the standard-bearers for the kind of eye-catching, bravura camera work Welles favoured. Expressionistic in the extreme, filled with shadows, angles and cinematic flourishes, the film raises the usual brooding nightmare ambience of film noir to a level few other pictures have attempted” – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

“Beginning with one of the most celebrated tracking shots in cinema history, a three-minute take in which a bomb is planted in a car that then explodes after crossing the US border, Welles created a baroque, highly stylised masterpiece from inauspiciously pulpy source material. With its story of murder, marijuana and police corruption, Touch of Evil is considered among the last of the 1940s/50s cycle of crime thrillers known as film noir. Welles’ vivid turn as corpulent bent cop Quinlan provided one of the genre’s most memorable villains.” – BFI citation for the Greatest Films of All Time Poll, 2022

Welles returned to Hollywood after a decade-long absence, first to accept the part of Police Chief Hank Quinlan, who solves his cases with… just a touch of evil, but eventually to take on the job of re-writing the script and directing the movie. Cut and re-edited by thestudio, it took decades before the film was finally reconstructed.

Introduced by Claude Gonzalez at Ritz Cinemas and by Adrian Danks at Lido Cinemas.

Rating

M

Duration

111 min

Language

English

Cast

Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich

Director

Orson Welles

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