Touch of Evil

Dir: Orson Welles, 95 minutes, 1952

I once got stuck in a small and decrepit Spanish lift between a very overweight, brandy-soaked Orson Welles and his almost equally large German shepherd dog. There was scarcely room to breathe, which was just as well, since the fumes might have killed me.

There is scarcely time to breathe in his 1958 masterpiece, Touch of Evil, surely one of the best film noirs of all time. It is mostly noted for a virtuoso three-minute crane shot near the beginning, but as a study of corruption, filmed mainly at night in Venice, California (doubling for a seedy Mexican border town), it impresses as a whole.

Welles makes himself look as sleazy as possible as Hank Quinlan, a crooked police chief who frames a young man; Charlton Heston is the narcotics investigator on holiday with his wife (Janet Leigh), who tries to stop him; Marlene Dietrich is Hank's former flame - "He was some kind of man," is the famous last line she utters when fate catches up with him.

Welles cleverly makes us sympathise with Hank while hating him at the same time.

This extended version, which Universal at first butchered, is as close to Welles's original as it is possible to get. Which is pretty darned good by any account.