The striking Touch of Evil score propelled Mancini out of anonymity. One admirer of the music was producer-director Blake Edwards, who hired Mancini to compose jazz music for his new television series, Peter Gunn. The show was a hit, due in large part to the music, which resulted in two best-selling RCA albums. The success of further Blake-Mancini collaborations, such as Mr. Lucky and the Pink Panther features, led to an extraordinary career for the young composer.
Welles originally cut Touch of Evil with editor Virgil Vogel. Dissatisfied with the result, Welles recut it completely with Aaron Stell, shuffling elements almost frantically, playing fast and loose with continuity and becoming increasingly unnerved. The continuity was rough-edged and non-linear, with cross-cutting almost as disorienting to audiences of that time as the labyrinthine pattern D. W. Griffith had employed four decades earlier in Intolerance. Typically, Welles didn’t stick around for postproduction. He and Tamiroff headed for Mexico to work on a cinematic version of Don Quixote.
Later, Welles returned to screen the studio’s cut. Some material had been dropped and several brief transitional scenes added to smooth the continuity. The lengthy opening shot had become a title sequence, with credits superimposed. The added scenes were directed and written by Harry Keller and filmed in "less than half a day," according to Heston, who adds that they "didn’t vastly enhance or hurt the film. They were there to help the progression of the story." Both Heston and the late Russell Metty stated that Welles’s concept was followed closely in the final cut, and that Keller’s scenes did not replace any of Welles’s footage. Janet Leigh agrees, but believes that although "the changes weren’t blatant, unfortunately they were just enough to take away the film’s edge."
After a preview, the picture was shortened by about one reel. It opened quietly in February of 1958, without a premiere or much promotion. Touch of Evil was a box-office flop, but a jury of international filmmakers awarded it the Grand Prix at the Brussels World’s Fair.
It was the last picture Welles directed in the United States.
Welles Gets His Say
On the same night Welles saw the studio’s cut of his film, he penned a 58-page memo detailing some 50 changes that he felt would improve the picture. For the most part this document is good-humored and friendly, although a bit of the heartbreak bleeds through. Several of the filmmaker’s suggestions were implemented, most were not.
Now, after 40 years, Touch of Evil has been recut, following Welles’s instructions to the letter. Sponsored by Universal and released by October films, the new edition was produced by Rick Schmidlin and edited by Walter Murch, who earned an Oscar for his work on The English Patient. Bob O’Neil was in charge of picture restoration, while the soundtrack was restored under the supervision of Bill Varney, Universal vice president of sound operations and winner of Academy Awards for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Allan Daviau, ASC, who first read the Welles memo in the fall 1992 issue of Film Quarterly, credits UCLA Film Archives founder Bob Epstein with finding the missing Evil footage. The cameraman recalls that in the mid-1980s, Epstein suspected that Universal may have had a print of the original Welles cut in their vaults. Requesting to screen every available print of the film, Epstein discovered a preview version of the picture, featuring the title-free opening shot and later-deleted scenes. This print supplied the footage that was required for the restoration, as per Welles’s memo. (Not incidentially, Daviau and friend Steven Spielberg had made a similar quest some years earlier, but had not found their Holy Grail.)
A new digital restoration process offered by Pacific Title Mirage was employed by O’Neil’s crew to repair film damage and decomposition in the source negatives. "One part looks as though the negative must have lain on the floor with people walking on it," O’Neal noted.
The serpentine opening shot is most strikingly altered by its return to Welles’s original concept. The overprinted titles of the earlier releases were an obstacle for anyone trying to concentrate on the picture, and even more of an annoyance for those few patrons who actually try to read the credits. (To this day, titles continue to be dumped onto opening sequences, and it’s still a bad idea.) The restoration of the scene’s ambient sound effects adds immeasurably to the establishment of the border town’s vulgar atmosphere, and actually helps mold the characterizations of the actors. The only regrettable aspect of the redone sequence is the necessary loss of Mancini’s opening music. Film restoration, like the march of civilization, sometimes demands that we take one step back before we can move two steps forward.
Schmidlin had done several years of research before the picture went back to the cutting room. The editing team worked for two months, incorporating both the release negative and the print of the longer preview version. "The film not only plays beautifully, but looks and sounds the way the master himself wanted it to," Schmidlin says. "That’s what people really want from this film to see Orson Welles’s work as he’d planned it. Screening Touch of Evil at the Cannes Film Festival this past summer was a dream come true for me, and for international cinema it’s an historic event."
[ Film credits continued on next page ]