It fascinates me how, for a guy who is widely known as a trailblazer, so much of Orson Welles’s work riffs on the past. As he himself pointed out, almost everything that Citizen Kane does is lifted from one silent film or another; meanwhile, Touch of Evil is, as I understand it, a straightforward parody of film noir. His cop character, Hank, merely pulls the longstanding subtext of police corruption into text; Susie (Janet Leigh) is forced, horrifically, to take on the role of a damsel-in-distress who appears, to the public, to be a femme fatale at the end. Movies and TV shows of the past two decades have been accused of leaning on the fourth wall and on satirizing viewer expectations far beyond whatever they used to; it’s amazing how much of this actually goes back far further than I’d anticipate.
With Welles in particular, his ability to juggle a whole system of techniques, ideas, and images in his head and put them on the film is remarkable; in this case, he’s deliberately turning the image a little bit to convey a particular point. This goes down to his acting; gestures, line deliveries, angles of turning his head even. This movie is incredibly coherent for something that was mangled; I watched the original version (because that’s what was available on Plex*) and this is still a very good movie.
(I have as much affection for Plex as our own Dave Shutton has for Tubi, and for similar reasons – there are so many classic movies, not just old American ones but Japanese and French, that I’ve always wanted to see on it. Fascinating how it’s the free-with-ads streaming services that I feel best serviced by.)
It’s hard to cut out the gorgeous construction of a frame. There are two shots I particularly like; one of Hank talking in the foreground while we see two of the characters arguing in the background, and one of Uncle Joe (Akim Tamiroff), standing menacingly while a light goes in and out over his face. Both are driven by the principle that motion on the screen keeps things visually interesting, and this is a principle that drives much of the imagery we see onscreen (this is also something Kurosawa understood very well).
Contemporary reviews dismissed it at the time for being ugly and formless; the sort of stupid comment you get when only one visual style is considered acceptable. Floating back to Welles’s sense of style, I get the impression that much of his ‘style’ comes down not to replicating certain images or ways of generating them, but from asking ‘what is the idea I am trying to convey here?’ and finding the cheapest, easiest, even bluntest way of doing that. That lets him find images that are as haunting as they are beautiful; sad, formless, pathetic images of people in a shitty situation.
The people of Touch of Evil have been trapped in their situation for a long time. Vargas (Charlton Heston) and Susie mostly exist outside this, pulled into it by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Hank has been deep in the garbage for so long it’s hard to tell if he’s been corrupted by it or was always like this. The various crooks see no other way of operating beyond what they do; if there’s a line between them and Hank, it’s Hank’s self-awareness, not nearly enough to save him.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Happy Endings, Season One, Episode Twelve, “Like Father, Like Gun”
“Okay, your grandma and I were going shot for shot–”
“Women be shopping! Women be shopping!”
“Maybe you’re in a slump because you keep calling it ‘intercourse’.”
“I appreciate that – you’re like my mom, but hot.”
“7:30. No. Scotty Pippin.”
Haha, Damon Wayans playing Damon Wayans Jr’s dad is obvious, but great.
“It’s not sexist if it’s racist.”
“Jane.”
“Goodnight.”
“Bradley.” [headslap]
“Have you and your father ever said ‘I love you’ to each other?”
“We don’t have to say it. We show it. By not saying it.”
“Do you think about these things before you say them, or just…?”
“Yeah. I do. I think ‘wow, that’s brilliant, I should say that out loud.’ Then I say it out loud. And it’s spectacular. It exceeds my expectations.”
Me.
“Oh my god, I speak a lot of Italian!”
“You guys don’t say ‘I love you’ to your dads, right?”
“All the time.”
“When I need money, so all the time.”
“Can we get a round of mimosas, please?’
“Oh come on! Okay, that sounds cool.”
“Oh my god, when I get drunk, I speak Italian!”
“Oh my god, when I get drunk, I eat ribs!”
“Date date sounds like a terrible Michael Keaton movie.”
“Or an amazing Ted Danson movie.”
“In my defense, I thought I was having a heart attack.”
“Hey! Get your own damn daddy!”
“There was nothing amateur about the beating I received that night.”
“Sidebar, I can’t believe he’s been having sex for an hour and a half.”
The boys and Alex getting into Nerf guns and it turning into a goofy action riff is a very Community story.
“And now you mock me with the very words my father used to use when he beat me?”
“My thing is gonna be tracksuits and light-to-moderate strip clubbing.”
Wayans’ little “I love…this random object or person” routine is just good, funny stuff.
There Will Be Blood – finally got around to rewatching this, almost 13 years after I logged it on Letterboxd and complained that I hadn’t really been able to get on the right wavelength. I would still say it’s just not the right kind of film to ever be among my PTA favourites, but I definitely appreciated the craft and the characters more this time – Daniel and Eli are both pretty loathsome which left the final scenes feeling a bit empty to me on that first viewing but with age and bitterness on my side I was definitely more into them destroying each others lives. Curious to revisit The Master next, another one I’ve only seen once and didn’t totally click with (although I liked it more than this one first time through).
Live Music – I’ve barely seen any live music this month for some reason but made it out to see Superchunk last night. I’m a pretty casual fan, I absolutely love the album Majesty Shredding and beyond that they have a number of songs I really like but none of the other albums have hit me in the same way. So I’m slightly annoyed to have seen them twice now years apart and only heard the same two songs from that one album on both occasions, haha. But they’re a really great live band and they blasted through a lot of their most energetic songs with only really one slower track (“Like a Fool”) in the middle. Support came from Middleman, a new-ish UK band who have a similar kind of sound with a slightly harder edge, they’ve got some great songs and a ton of promise but lack a little something in stage presence, which is a shame. Excellent riffs though.
Seinfeld, S8 – “The Chicken Roaster”, “The Abstinence”, “The Andrea Doria”, “The Little Jerry”. Season 8 continues to deliver zanier plots that are wonderful when they pay off and a little offputting when they don’t. I thought “The Abstinence” was the best of these, lack of sex making George smarter and Elaine stupider is a solid premise that leads to some killer moments. “The Little Jerry” might be the peak evidence for these characters all being truly awful and when the show really leans into that vein it really does feel like proto-Almost Sunny, no complaints on that front. The other two were a little more mixed, although Jerry and Kramer swapping apartments and personalities in “The Chicken Roaster” was good fun.
I feel like Always Sunny lifts most strongly from these last two seasons – you’ll see a lot of scenes of the characters deliberately roasting each other when the opportunity pops up that feel like Always Sunny made their whole show out of.
“I see nothing I like in people” has weirdly stuck with me and I couldn’t tell you why.
I have a friend who says he relates to the “I can’t keep doing this on my own with these … people” part of that speech more and more each year.
Very reminiscent of one of my favorite 8 Bit Theater lines: “I’ve spoken to people. They can offer us nothing.”
Wooooo live music! Never seen Superchunk but I really should, I love their sound.
George’s redumbening with the test tubes is so great.
I’ve only seen them once before, at a festival in 2013. They’ve had a couple of lineup changes since then but they seem like a band who would consistently deliver the goods! Even as a casual fam I love that they change up their set every night, very cool when a band have the skills / deep catalogue to do that.
Project Hail Martian….I mean Hail Mary – This is a fun and well made and entertaining movie with a solid performance by Ryan Gosling and strong production values and FX. An actual puppet instead of CGI is always better. And it takes science seriously, even if huge chunks of the science are made up. But it is a good movie? Don’t tell my wife or the friends we watched this with, but I have my doubts. It’s incredibly derivative of The Martian (obviously not a surprise given it’s from a book by the same author and has a screenplay by the same guy, Drew Godard, and also derivative of lots and lots of movies. (2010 anyone?) It’s too long by 20 minutes and a couple of scenes didn’t add anything. The “nerdy guy in space” shtick and the pop culture references are getting old. And I cannot stand having my emotions manipulated so blatantly (and unsuccessfully). Plus I am told the book was not that funny, and was in fact a lot darker. We have one scene that shows that darkness, and I kind of want that movie instead of this. But crowd pleasers can’t be dark. I guess I don’t want crowd pleasers anymore.
Always Sunnys — season 13? 14? Still solid to great, I really like when the Gang just starts rolling with tertiary shit (the smoking in Hero Or Hate Crime, for example).
Veronica Mars — popping into season one and it’s time for bum fights! Oh Logan, you scamp. But this episode winds up being very well structured in the end and its very dark reveal of just why Logan might have violent cruelty in his system, and why he fucking owns for screwing his dad over even though he knows what’s coming. It’s a lot easier to root for the bad boy than the conflicted good (or “good”) guy but Dohring is also just charismatic as hell compared to Dunn’s mopey dullness — the subsequent episode has the pair-up with Weevil and Dohring and Capra make the opposite sides of the track united in sarcasm work beautifully, with outstanding support from Steven Williams as the would-be hardass English teacher. Some great adults here, Jane Lynch is an evil civics teacher in the prior episode and I was hooting and hollering at Duane Daniels’ Principal Clemmons, I’d forgotten how great he is as the Billings of the show.
The Gang’s collective horror at the Ass Pounder is so funny. “But you’ve got the slits in the bike shorts…?” That and “Mac, just come out, we hate you anyway, it doesn’t matter.”
The Ass Pounder’s repeated sproinging up should be taught in schools. For comedic timing purposes!
The first season of Veronica Mars is pretty much a perfectly formed work to me (NB: I haven’t revisited it in a while, but it got into my brain chemistry when I first saw it, and true love lasts a lifetime). And reading about that episode immediately gets “Ventura Highway” playing in my head.
I watched the first three seasons well after the fact and am a second season truther — the first season is still dicking around with Veronica’s mom, blergh, and in general it doesn’t link the overarching mystery to the case of the week plots quite as well. And the second season’s generational divide hits much harder, it was interesting watching the second episode here and seeing Veronica immediately side with parents trying to find their kid instead of considering why a kid (who is an adult, right?) might not want to be found. But I imagine that first season hit like lightning.
Pillion – Apparently something of a transformation/sanitizing of the original novella it’s based on but I dunno if that matters too much given what a good, textured film it is. Pillion reminds me of Secretary without it’s (lovely) romantic ending, more aware of the compromises and boundaries people have to form in relationships and dom/sub dynamics, which is what Colin ultimately has to sort out for himself. Melton is a revelation, his big eyes adoring and questioning, while Skarsgaard is using all of his charisma and sinister, more unreadable qualities as an actor. (I am uncomfortably sympathetic to Ray, much like Reynolds in Phantom Thread, having created a very specific life and routine for himself and no real interest in changing it for the sake of greater intimacy or vulnerability.) Douglas Hodge and Lesley Sharp are lovely as Colin’s parents as well (the former actually more immediately recognizing what Colin is doing and reserving any judgment).
My wife and I saw this on our 10-year anniversary this year! Very fun theater-going experience at a place that does queer movie nights.
The Last Wave
The apocalyptic visions worked very well for me, and this does capture the feeling of consensus modern reality as a thin and very breakable skin over something much richer and stranger, which I like. But I don’t think Weir is all that successful with his Aboriginal characters, who always feel more entirely unworldly than they should; David gets scolded for romanticizing his clients, but I think the film’s trying to have its cake and eat it too in that regard. Also hard for me not to compare this to Picnic at Hanging Rock, a favorite, and find it wanting, especially when I feel like Picnic doesn’t fall into the same kind of uncanny valley of exposition that this does, where things are ultimately too specific and too labeled for sheer symbolic, dreamlike force but not specific and comprehensible enough for it to be satisfying to me on a kind of mystery investigation front. That said: bizarre how much this feels like it could be an X-Files episode.
Not at all a bad movie, but one that I feel like has been surpassed in most of its component parts without especially hitting for me on its own.
Forbidden Fruits
A kind of updated combo of The Craft and Mean Girls, set in a boutique mall store. Funny, especially early on, and beautiful to look at (the costuming! The colors!), and the eventual outpouring of gore isn’t bad at all, but this ultimately feels like a shallow film trying and failing to be more than its superficial pleasures. It has ambitions and things to say, but I’m not convinced it says those things well or coherently. I’m also absolutely baffled by the mid-credits sequence. Glad that Scottish fold cat is alive and well, but aside from that … I do not come to bitchy, witchy female ensemble movies full of violence and fashion to hope that their internecine murders and competing feminist tensions will eventually be lawfully sorted out by the police, and I don’t know who would.
Safe
For Movie Club. Fascinating how Carol’s illness is inseparable from her social environment no matter how you interpret it (and I lean towards it having real environmental causes), because her hermetically sealed upper-class suburban world is defined by its unnaturalness anyway: this is a world where nothing is walkable, where the new fashionable hairstyle demands chemical alteration, where all natural pleasures (from food to sex) have become either artificially constricted or joyless through persistence of institution over emotion. Few things feel as skin-crawling to me in this movie than the scene where she can’t even not laugh at a risque dinner party joke without having her lack of reaction called out and scrutinized; the social script is so rigid that even a missed line is a sin that demands public expiation. It’s a milieu that fosters illness, both a literal sensitivity to certain chemicals and an almost skinless sensitivity to expectation and reception.
Born Yesterday
Judy Holliday is terrific as Billie Dawn, an ex-chorusgirl and current long-standing fiancee of the bullying junkyard tycoon Harry Brock. Brock enlists idealistic, acerbic reporter Paul to give the uneducated Billie enough tutoring to make her passable in his new Washington, D.C. setting (he’s there to buy up the government, naturally), and while he probably anticipates some kind of My Fair Lady social transformation, Paul instead introduces Billie to genuine moral and intellectual questions that give her an idealism of her own.
This is unequivocally Holliday’s movie, and she makes Billie absolutely adorable and brittle and heroic; I’m sad all over again that Holliday died so young. A supremely enjoyable film.
Widow’s Bay, “Beach Reads,” “What to Expect on Your Trip,” and “Our History”
Still going strong. The standout entry here is “Beach Reads,” an incredible showcase episode for Kate O’Flynn’s Patricia and full of blistering dark comedy: I can still laugh my ass off thinking about you have to reinterpret Dale Dickey’s character’s mildly expressed concerns about her “headpiece” and her frustration with sourcing everything for the party by the end. The Tom-Wyck confusion in “What to Expect on Your Trip” is another great beat.
Picnic At Hanging Rock is as close to pure Robert Aickman as the cinema gets, its strangeness and uncanniness is beyond grasp, and I think The Last Wave is definitely in conversation with it but is up to something different. Picnic is a colonialist’s movie, the Brits come to a strange land and impose their bullshit on it and cannot process its strangeness, and any Aboriginal characters there are purely incidental (as they would be seen by the Brits), right? Wave is post-colonial and guilty, when I last watched it I was struck with how open the white characters are about how they tried to wipe out the Aborginal people and how that was bad, sure, but they’re not really bothered by it. But the Aboriginal people are still around, reminding Chamberlain of his complicity, and this gives him an empathetic motivation that is absent from Picnic (which has eerie empathetic resonance instead, the haunting feeling that causes our ladies to vanish) and leads him to control or maybe repair a narrative he does not understand. And he can’t understand it because of who he is. I think the real comparison here is the towering piece of Graham Greene ownage Clearcut, about another lawyer who thinks he is doing the right thing for people who need help, and how his help is blinkered and snakebit from the start.
I thought about Clearcut while watching this! That works better* for me, I think because Greene is such an undeniable, visceral presence in it in a way that Gulpilil isn’t quite given the material for here (though he does a good job with what he has). It has the postcolonial awareness and perspective that Picnic doesn’t, but where it falls short in that regard feels like a persistent itch to me. What you say here does help me appreciate it more, though.
* And by “better,” I mean “like gangbusters, 11/10.” I still need to write that up.
Yeah, Clearcut is more vicious because its would-be white savior is in that mode from the start and his position is bad from the start, Chamberlain takes up his position because of his principles but wouldn’t have done so if it wasn’t placed there before him, so he’s on a more probing journey of discovery. There’s a mystery there, Clearcut is blunter. Which is not a critique at all, like you say 11/10.
I think the other thing Weir does in Wave is continue his look at men vs. nature — Picnic is warier, Nature is there and ominous; while in Wave Nature is theoretically subdued but lurking and intrusive, the sound work here is incredible. Return of the repressed.
You had QUALMS?! The blink and you’ll miss it shot in the mirror as Patricia dances is so goddamn frightening.
Rancho Notorious – A tale of “hate, murder and revenge” as Arthur Kennedy sets out to avenge the murder of his sweetheart. His search for the killer leads him to Chuck-a-Luck, a hideout town for outlaws run by Marlene Dietrich. From all the stories he hears along the way Kennedy has already fallen in love with Dietrich before he even arrives, but has to vie for Dietrich’s attention against Mel Ferrer. This feels like a satire, almost a spoof, of western genre tropes. Fritz Lang looks at morality gone bad – good guys are as bad as the bad guys – a bit like Lang’s The Big Heat. The song that runs throughout commenting on the action and its refrain of “hate, murder and revenge” is a little goofy. Western tropes – gunfights, barroom carousing and fighting, the cowboy with a blond wig, the barber shaving one guy and cutting the hair of another, at the same time! – are all dialed to eleven, again, being kind of goofy. Lang has a very controlled atmosphere and artificiality with it being mostly shot in a studio with very few exterior shots. Despite the control all the scenes, character motivations, and interactions feel very authentic. Took a bit to get on its wavelength but enjoyed this by the end. This was Marlene Dietrich’s last film in her run of about one a year. After this she only made a handful, though a few are bangers, including Touch of Evil.
“a bit like Lang’s The Big Heat” sign me up! What a perverse film that is.
Amazon Prime is trying to up its classic movie game but Tubi is still way ahead. (And HBO Max continues to have a decent TCM selection but the turnover is rapid.)
What did we play?
Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium 2001 – Capcom Fighting Collection 2 on Nintendo Switch
Just played a few rounds with Ken, Mai, and Terry, because the menu was so confusing I couldn’t find Chun Li. Feels slower than the first CvS and other contemporary Capcom/SNK fighters, and not distinctive enough, but I expect that will change with some more time put into it. Cool energy though, will definitely try out the more exotic characters.
Truly bizarre to me to learn that any Welles movie was every called ugly: they all feel like they have such a vivid, kinetic life to them for all the reasons you mentioned. This is one where you technically quibble with the certain bits of plotting on a logical level but who ever would. And Welles is, as usual, incredible on the acting side of things as well.
There’s a certain element of spite to negative Welles reviews, like “Let’s take this boy genius down a peg.”
I’ve always liked this version of the main theme music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRbc5lySm20
Year of the Month update!
This July, we’re opening up submissions for your writing on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
Jul. 3rd: Bridgett Taylor: Apocalypse Now
Jul. 5th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Stalker
Jul. 14th: Lauren James: Flowers in the Attic
Jul. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Guards! Guards!
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story