IMDb
[=>-Touch Of Evil Orson Welles]
Rotten Tomatoes
[=>-Touch Of Evil Orson Welles]
Roger Ebert
[=>-Touch Of Evil Orson Welles]
Plot.
This baroque nightmare of a south-of-the-border mystery is considered to be
one of the great movies of Orson Welles, who both directed and starred in it.
On honeymoon with his new bride, Susan (Janet Leigh), Mexican-born policeman
Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) agrees to investigate a bomb explosion. In so
doing, he incurs the wrath of local police chief Hank Quinlan (Welles), a
corrupt, bullying behemoth with a perfect arrest record. Vargas suspects that
Quinlan has planted evidence to win his past convictions, and he isn't about
to let the suspect in the current case be railroaded. Quinlan, whose obsession
with his own brand of justice is motivated by the long-ago murder of his wife,
is equally determined to get Vargas out of his hair, and he makes a deal with
local crime boss Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) to frame Susan on a drug
rap, leading to one of the movie's many truly harrowing sequences. Touch of
Evil dissects the nature of good and evil in a hallucinatory, nightmarish
ambiance, helped by the shadow-laden cinematography of Russell Metty and by
the cast, which, along with Tamiroff and Welles includes Charlton Heston as a
Mexican; Marlene Dietrich, in a brunette wig, as a brittle madam who delivers
the movie's unforgettable closing words; Mercedes McCambridge as a junkie, and
Dennis Weaver as a tremulous motel clerk. Touch of Evil has been released with
four different running times -- 95 minutes for the 1958 original, which was
taken away from Welles and brutally cut by the studio; 108 minutes and 114
minutes in later versions; and 111 minutes in the 1998 restoration. Based on
a 58-page memo written by Welles after he was barred from the editing room
during the film's original post-production, this restoration, among numerous
other changes, removed the opening titles and Henry Mancini's music from the
opening crane shot, which in either version ranks as one of the most
remarkably extended long takes in movie history.
Stars.
=>-Charlton Heston : Mike Vargas.
=>-Janet Leigh : Susan Vargas.
=>-Orson Welles : Police Captain Hank Quinlan.
=>-Joseph Calleia : Pete Menzies.
=>-Akim Tamiroff : Joe Grandi.
=>-Dennis Weaver : Night Manager.
Director.
=>-Orson Welles.
Info.
=>-Genre : Mystery : Film-Noir : Crime : Thriller.
=>-Release Date : 1958.
=>-Language : English : French : German : Italian : Spanish..
=>-File Size : 1.76 GiB.
=>-Overall bit rate : 2 368 kbps.
=>-Movie Runtime : 1h 46min.
Video.
=>-Codec : H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.
=>-Aspect Ratio : 16:9.
=>-Resolution : 720 x 400.
=>-Bit rate : 1 555 kbps.
Audio 1 English.
=>-Codec : mp4a: MPEG-4 AAC LC.
=>-Channels : 2 channel.
=>-Bit Rate : 112 kbps.
=>-Maximum bit rate : 132 kbps.
Audio 2 English.
=>-Codec : Digital Audio Compression AC-3.
=>-Channels : 2 channels.
=>-Bit Rate : 224 kbps.
=>-Bit rate mode : Constant.
Audio 3 French.
=>-Codec : mp4a: MPEG-4 AAC LC.
=>-Channels : 2 channelS.
=>-Bit Rate : 112 kbps.
=>-Maximum bit rate : 142 kbps.
Audio 4 German.
=>-Codec : mp4a: MPEG-4 AAC LC.
=>-Channels : 2 channelS.
=>-Bit Rate : 112 kbps.
=>-Maximum bit rate : 145 kbps.
Audio 5 Italian.
=>-Codec : mp4a: MPEG-4 AAC LC.
=>-Channels : 2 channelS.
=>-Bit Rate : 112 kbps.
=>-Maximum bit rate : 143 kbps.
Audio 6 Spanish.
=>-Codec : mp4a: MPEG-4 AAC LC.
=>-Channels : 2 channelS.
=>-Bit Rate : 112 kbps.
=>-Maximum bit rate : 164 kbps.
Subtitles Softsubbed SubRip IDXVobSub MicroDVD.
=>-English.
=>-French.
=>-German.
=>-Italian.
=>-Spanish.
=>-Portuguese.
=>-Dutch.
=>-Swedish.
=>-Danish.
=>-Finnish.
=>-Norwegian.
=>-Hebrew.
=>-Arabic.
=>-Russian.
=>-Turkish.
=>-Greek.
