The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Orson Welles · a film · 1958 · the 1998 reconstruction to the director’s memorandum, about 111 minutes · black and white
Mode
Crime film turned to tragedy; a frame-up, a kidnapping and a fall, told by a moving camera in a border town at night
Mythos
The fall of a great man by his own gift; the friend who owed him his life and brings him down; the sibyl who reads his future; the threshold of the border and the descent into dirty water
Phase
From a bomb set in a car to a body in the water among the derricks, over a few days and nights in a border town
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, judged in the 1998 reconstruction of about 111 minutes made to the director’s memorandum by Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch; the 1958 release of about 93 to 95 minutes was recut by the studio and partly reshot; photographed by Russell Metty, music by Henry Mancini
Register
Baroque, nocturnal and grotesque; low angles, wide lenses and long takes; comedy of panic and of a toupee beside a strangling, and elegy in a parlour lit for the past
Scale
One border town and its two jurisdictions, a hotel, a motel and the water under a bridge; a few days and nights
Governing Proposition
A bomb crosses the Mexican border in the boot of a car and kills a man, and a Mexican narcotics official on his honeymoon finds himself set against the American police captain who runs the case: a great detective gone to drink and grief, who plants evidence on the men he knows are guilty. While the husband proves the frame-up, his wife is held by a crime family in a motel and a hotel. The wager of the film is that a policeman’s certainty, even when it is right, corrupts the law, and that a studio crime picture made in a baroque manner of long takes, low angles and layered sound can make that corruption a tragedy whose fallen man is also its most moving figure.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A bomb is set in the boot of a car. The car moves off, and the camera, on a crane, rises and follows it through the streets of a border town at night, beside a newly married couple on foot, to the crossing, where the car and the couple pass into the United States at walking pace. There is no cut. Then the car explodes. The couple are Mike Vargas, a Mexican narcotics official, and his American wife Susan.
In the 1958 release the shot ran under the main titles and Henry Mancini’s theme. In the reconstruction of 1998 it runs as Welles asked: without titles, under the sound of the town, its radios and clubs, so that the dread is carried by the movement and the noise of ordinary night. The shot is the film’s argument before the plot begins. The camera crosses the border without a break, so that the two countries are one space, and the bomb that crosses with it makes that space a single crime.
Orson Welles wrote the screenplay from Whit Masterson’s novel Badge of Evil and directed for Universal-International, with Albert Zugsmith producing, Russell Metty photographing in black and white and Alexander Golitzen and Robert Clatworthy designing. It was his first Hollywood studio picture in a decade, a programmer on a programmer’s budget. He was taken off the film before it was finished; the studio recut it, and Harry Keller directed further scenes late in 1957. The film was released in 1958 at about 93 to 95 minutes. The version judged here is the reconstruction of 1998, about 111 minutes, produced by Rick Schmidlin and edited and remixed by Walter Murch, with Jonathan Rosenbaum as consultant.
Movement II
The case belongs to Hank Quinlan, captain of police on the American side, played by Welles himself: huge, slow, chewing candy bars, leaning on a cane, his face seen from below so that he fills the frame like a building. Beside him is Pete Menzies, played by Joseph Calleia, his partner and his friend, who owes him his life: Quinlan once took a bullet meant for him. Vargas, played by Charlton Heston, attaches himself to the investigation over the quarrel of jurisdiction, and Quinlan’s contempt for him is also contempt for Mexicans.
Quinlan has a suspect, Sanchez, a young Mexican, and an intuition that he is guilty. In Sanchez’s apartment the interrogation is one long take, crowded with people moving through small rooms. Vargas uses the bathroom, and the shoebox there is empty. A little later Quinlan’s men search the bathroom and find the shoebox full of dynamite. The film has shown the frame-up before anyone in it can prove it, and Vargas, who saw the empty box, sets out to prove it and to break Quinlan.
Here the film makes its hardest move. Quinlan planted the dynamite, and Sanchez confesses after all. The framer was right about the man he framed. The film refuses the lesson that the abuse is wrong because it convicts the innocent, and makes the frame-up wrong in itself: a policeman’s certainty, even when it is correct, corrupts the law it serves. Quinlan’s wife was strangled long ago, and her killer went free; that is why he plants evidence, and why his certainty has become his law. Vargas, whose legalism is right, is also cold, and while he pursues it he leaves his wife alone.
Movement III
Susan, played by Janet Leigh, is alone in the town, and the Grandis, a crime family with a score against her husband, led by Uncle Joe Grandi, played by Akim Tamiroff in a toupee, take hold of her. She is held at the Mirador, a motel, where the night man, played by Dennis Weaver, twitches and stammers in comic panic and a gang in leather jackets moves in around her. They drug her.
The Mirador line is the film’s weakest part. It makes one point, Susan’s danger, at great length, and the motel’s terror is cruder than the rest; Leigh’s scenes are pitched broad, and the drug party tips from the grotesque into exploitation. The memorandum asked that the two lines be intercut, and the reconstruction does it, so that her danger runs against Vargas’s legal crusade and each line comments on the other. The intercutting improves the proportion. It does not remove the excess, and some connective scenes between the husband and wife, flat beside the rest, remain where no footage by Welles survived.
Susan is moved, unconscious, to a room in a hotel in the town, and Quinlan, deep in drink, comes there to Grandi. There Quinlan strangles Grandi on the bed beside her, the room lit and darkened by a flashing sign outside the window, Grandi’s eyes bulging over her face. It is one of the great horror passages of the American crime film, and it is the place where the two lines become one crime, and the man who committed it is the law.
Movement IV
Out on the edge of the town Tana keeps a parlour, and Quinlan goes there in the night. She is played by Marlene Dietrich, a pianola plays in the room, and the man before her is fat now, and not the man she once knew. She reads the cards for him and tells him his future is “all used up.” The line lands as prophecy.
The parlour is elegy, of a kind the genre rarely reaches. Tana remembers the man Quinlan was, and the film lets the memory stand beside the monster it has shown, so that he becomes pitiable without ceasing to be monstrous. Welles’s performance holds both. Quinlan is swollen, intuitive and sentimental, a great detective whose gift is real and has been turned by grief and drink to the manufacture of proof. His fall is a tragedy of the oldest pattern: the great man brought down by his own flaw.
The one figure the film leaves outside its law is the hero. Heston’s Vargas, in makeup as a Mexican official, plays from another kind of picture: correct, upright and nearly inert, a Hollywood hero set down in an expressionist world. The film uses that distance, since his cleanliness is part of what it questions, but it does not wholly govern it, and the casting is fixed to its moment. The border is drawn from the American side, and the Mexican side is seen as the American town sees it.
Movement V
Menzies turns. The friend who owes Quinlan his life agrees to wear a wire for Vargas, and walks with Quinlan at night by the water, under a bridge among the oil derricks, while Vargas follows with a recorder. Quinlan talks. His voice comes back from the recorder, and the echo off the bridge betrays the wire: he hears himself, and knows. Vargas, the clean one, has put a wire on a broken man and turned his friend’s voice against him. Menzies dies, and Quinlan’s body falls into the filthy water.
Tana speaks over him, a few words of epitaph, and the eulogy closes the tragedy. The film ends where it began, in a border town at night, but with one man and one voice in place of a car and a crowd. The form has been the knowledge throughout: a camera that crossed the line without a cut, and a man undone by his own words returned to him by a machine.
The film was released in 1958 low on a double bill in the United States and was little noticed there; in Europe the French critics took it up at once, and it came to be named as the close of the classic noir cycle. Welles did not direct for Hollywood again. After seeing the studio’s cut he had written a long memorandum to the head of production, Edward Muhl, setting down what he wanted: the opening without titles, the music of the town under it, the two lines intercut, the sound of the hotel and the motel. The reconstruction of 1998 was made to that memorandum. It is the closest surviving approach to the film Welles made, and it is not his cut, which never existed in finished form: a film whose maker had to write it down because he was not allowed to cut it.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. The bomb sets the quarrel over jurisdiction that sets Vargas against Quinlan; the shoebox, empty when Vargas uses the bathroom and full of dynamite when Quinlan’s men search it, is the hinge of the case; Quinlan’s dead wife and her unpunished strangler explain why he plants evidence; the bullet Quinlan once took for Menzies is what makes the last betrayal cost. Grandi’s murder in the hotel, with Susan unconscious on the bed, is where both lines become one crime. The subtractive test bites on the Susan line. The Mirador sequence, the night man’s twitching, the leather-jacketed gang and the drug party make one point at great length; the reconstruction’s intercutting improves the proportion without removing the excess, and several of the connective scenes by another director could go.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a policeman’s certainty of guilt corrupts the law even when the certainty is right. Quinlan plants the dynamite, and Sanchez confesses after all; the film refuses the easy lesson that the framer was wrong, and makes its case against him on the frame-up itself. Against him stands Vargas, whose legalism is right and also cold, and who neglects his wife while he proves it. Under that lies the border: two jurisdictions, an American policeman’s contempt for Mexicans, a town that lives off crossing, where law is whatever the man with the badge says it is. Image discloses as fully as speech: Quinlan’s bulk from below, the recorder giving back his voice. It stands at the gate because part of the meaning is carried as decay and atmosphere, and the town is drawn as a grotesque more than as a society.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful, and it rests on four sequences, not one. The opening crane follows a car carrying a bomb across a border to its explosion and holds the whole film’s dread in one unbroken movement. Grandi’s strangling in the hotel room, lit by a flashing sign, his eyes bulging over Susan’s unconscious face, is one of the great horror passages of the American crime film. Tana’s parlour, the pianola playing and Dietrich reading the cards for the fat man she once knew, reaches an elegy the genre rarely reaches, and her verdict on his future lands as prophecy. The last sequence, Quinlan’s voice coming back from the recorder under the bridge and his body falling into the filthy water, is the summit. Held below the top because the motel’s terror is cruder, and some of the height is of style more than feeling.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The myth is partly built. The fall of a great man by his own flaw is load-bearing: Quinlan was a fine detective, his intuition is real, and his ruin is the corruption of that gift by grief and drink; he is brought down by the friend who loved him and owed him his life. Tana, who reads that his future is used up, is a sibyl in a brothel, and her eulogy closes the tragedy. The border is the threshold, crossed in the first shot and never quite crossed back; the death in dirty water is a descent. The particular stays particular: candy bars, a cane, a shoebox, a hearing aid. A tenth short of the gate, because the archetype is carried largely by Welles’s body, voice and style rather than worked through, the Vargas side is the pure knight evoked rather than built, and the betrayal by a friend repeats in another key what The Third Man had done.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the American crime film of the 1940s and 1950s, the Universal programmer the film was commissioned to be, and Welles’s own path: the deep focus and low angles of Citizen Kane, the grotesque and the funhouse of The Lady from Shanghai (1947), the moving camera of a stage-trained director. The turns are real: a policier made into baroque tragedy; the villain made the film’s centre and its most moving figure, the hero correct and nearly inert; long takes and overlapping sound carried into a genre built on cutting and clarity; a border town shown as one sick body. The stake was large: his first Hollywood studio picture in a decade, on a programmer’s budget, and he lost the film to the studio and did not direct for Hollywood again. Three tenths short of the gate because most of the devices are a proven path pushed further, not a new turn.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The moving camera is the border: it crosses and recrosses lines without a cut, so that the viewer feels the two countries as one space before the plot has said so. The low angles make Quinlan monstrous and then, held long enough, pitiable. The interrogation in Sanchez’s apartment, one long take crowded with people moving through small rooms, makes the frame-up a matter of who stands where, and when. The recording sequence is the form of the knowledge: Quinlan is undone by his own voice played back, and the echo off the bridge is what betrays the wire. The intercutting restored in 1998 holds the two lines against each other as the memorandum describes. The cost: the motel line’s form is pulp rather than instrument, and the connective scenes by another hand sit inside it as seams.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Sixty-eight years of return are evidence. Formally the film yields without end: the opening take, the take in Sanchez’s apartment, the sound, Metty’s lighting of the night streets are taught and taken apart, and the existence of three versions has made the film itself an object of study, its making read through the memorandum line by line. Morally it grows harder with return: Quinlan’s being right about Sanchez weighs more each time, Vargas looks less like a hero, Menzies’s betrayal more like grief. It has been read as Welles’s self-portrait, as a film about race and the border, as the end of film noir, as a tragedy of the American police. What holds the axis: the readings converge around Quinlan, and much of the literature is about the making and the versions rather than about what the film knows.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1950s, and the intrinsic force is high. The film carries the American crime film to a baroque end, puts the corruption of law at its centre, and extends the long take and layered sound into genre filmmaking with a force few films of the decade matched; it is often named as the close of the classic noir cycle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in the United States it was released low on a double bill and little noticed, while in Europe the French critics above all took it up at once. Its opening shot became a touchstone for the long take, cited by name in the opening take of Altman’s The Player (1992) and followed by many, and the 1998 reconstruction renewed its reach and made the case for restoring films to their makers’ instructions. Two tenths short of the gate because much of its grammar was Kane’s and its reach was delayed.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-eight years. Form: the 1958 release survives whole, but it was an altered version, recut and partly reshot against the director’s wishes, and the version he made was never finished. The reconstruction repairs much, the sound of the opening, the intercutting and the order of scenes; it cannot repair all, since it works from a memorandum against the studio’s cut, keeps the scenes another director shot, and is an inference by other hands forty years on. That loss takes the film’s proportion and finish, not its substance, and is charged in proportion. Presence is continuous in repertory, teaching and every home format, wide in the cinema and narrow beyond it, and divided among three versions. Heston’s brownface as a Mexican official is a surface fixed to its moment. The monochrome is the smallest charge. The figure stands at the bar.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The making bears weight throughout. Metty’s night photography, wide lenses and deep focus in real streets, is among the great camera work of the decade, and the crane and the long takes are executed as well as conceived. Welles’s Quinlan, swollen, intuitive and sentimental, is screen acting at its summit; Dietrich, Calleia and Tamiroff are exact; Mancini’s score, much of it source music from radios and clubs, is woven into the sound. The charges fall where they matter: Heston, in makeup, is stiff as a Mexican official; Leigh’s motel scenes are pitched broad; Weaver’s night man is a mannerism; the exposition of the plot is murky; and the scenes by another director, kept in the reconstruction, are flat beside the rest. The 1958 release carries the same charges more heavily.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the night man at the Mirador, twitching in comic panic, and Tana’s quiet elegy over Quinlan’s body. One law governs both: a border world where everything is contaminated and grotesque, where the law decays from inside and every figure is distorted by the frame. The comedy is grotesque and the elegy is the grotesque made tender; Grandi’s toupee and his strangling obey the same law. No one stands outside it: Vargas, the clean one, puts a wire on a broken man and turns his friend’s voice against him. The strain is in tone and in casting. The gang’s drug party in the motel tips from grotesque into exploitation, a law of its own, and Heston’s Vargas stands in the film from another kind of picture, a Hollywood hero in an expressionist world, which the film uses but does not wholly govern.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what a crime film of about 111 minutes holds. The orders are many and held in one structure: the state, in two jurisdictions, a district attorney, police on both sides and the politics of a narcotics case; the law and its corruption; race and the border, in contempt, in a marriage across it and in a town living off crossing; the family, in a marriage tested by a husband’s crusade and a crime family’s revenge; crime and its trade; consciousness, in Quinlan’s grief, drink and pride; history, in a dead wife, an unpunished murder and Tana’s memory of the man he was; industry, in the derricks of the last scene. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the town’s people are glimpsed, labour and the sacred are absent, Susan’s consciousness is a victim’s, and the Mexican side of the border is drawn from the American.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.8, then The Sublime at 8.6, then The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.5. Night photography, long takes and a central performance at the summit of the medium; four sequences of dread and elegy, the opening crane, the strangling by the flashing sign, Tana’s parlour and the voice under the bridge; a disclosure about the law that refuses the easy lesson; and sixty-eight years of presence held back by a released form altered against its maker.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7: the state, the law, the border, the family, crime and consciousness are held in one structure, but the town’s people are glimpsed, labour and the sacred are absent, and the Mexican side is drawn from the American. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.0, where the Mirador line makes one point at great length, and The Swerve at 8.2, a proven path pushed further rather than a new turn.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Unconcealment and The Imperishable meet the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 two tenths short and The Swerve at 8.2 three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 100.1, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Touch of Evil in the reconstruction of 1998, about 111 minutes, in black and white, produced by Rick Schmidlin and edited and remixed by Walter Murch, with Jonathan Rosenbaum as consultant, made to the memorandum Orson Welles wrote to Universal’s head of production, Edward Muhl, after seeing the studio’s cut. The film was directed and written by Welles from Whit Masterson’s novel Badge of Evil (1956), produced by Albert Zugsmith for Universal-International, photographed by Russell Metty, with music by Henry Mancini, art direction by Alexander Golitzen and Robert Clatworthy, and editing credited to Virgil W. Vogel and Aaron Stell. The 1958 release, about 93 to 95 minutes, recut by the studio with scenes directed by Harry Keller and the main titles laid over the opening shot, is named and weighed: every axis judges the reconstruction, and the difference between the versions is charged and credited chiefly on The Imperishable, where the reconstruction counts as repair; on the 1958 release The Inevitable, The Living Form and The Inner Law would each read lower. No print, script or memorandum was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and one line of three words is quoted. Details that could not be verified, among them the dates and places of shooting, the date and length of the memorandum and its requests beyond the best known, the running time of the preview version, the length of the opening take, the content of each scene Keller directed, the season of the American release and any festival prize, are not given.