A Touch Of Evil Re-Visit --- Part One

Not that Touch Of Evil needs my stamp of approval, but after e-mail exchanges where readers questioned previous dismissal of it, I decided to give Orson's 1958 "Last of The Classic Noirs" another chance. This time it was 1998's reconstruction that got an airing. Talent responsible for that deserve applause for putting TOE very near what Welles envisioned. I admire the film more now without necessarily enjoying the sit. A friend describes it as slimy, and there's an apt word to sum up those 108 minutes. I came away feeling like OW must have after falling backward into sewage at Touch Of Evil's finish. Can you blame Universal execs' apprehension? What fans call baroque, they thought extreme; too much so for 1958 patronage. Was it just Orson again being years ahead of his time? I can't imagine a remade Touch Of Evil faring well in 2010, so maybe we've still got catching up to do. A modern writer referenced TOE as "a B movie crime thriller" to which I respectfully take exception: No immediate post- Ten Commandments Charlton Heston vehicle is/was a B movie. He was a major outside name Universal-International was lucky to get, a big enough influence to arrange the director chair for Welles and allow his own (should have been lead) role to ultimately play second violin behind Orson's flamboyant heavy. Touch Of Evil began at least as an important film because Heston was starring. With The Ten Commandments into a second year of release, and just now canvassing smaller towns and drive-ins, CH was a major draw, and other than Three Violent People and some television, had done little as of early 1958 to follow-up on Moses.

Another Welles scholar says Touch Of Evil was reworked and tossed away by Universal. Records are replete as to the reworking, but I question somewhat the tossing away part. There's no doubt of Universal's disappointment (if not outright disgust) with Touch Of Evil, but again, there was a relationship with Heston to maintain, whatever their low opinion of his director, and in consideration of that, they'd not dump the finished film so casually. A trade ad was run (above) ... first in The Motion Picture Herald (January 11, 1958), then Boxoffice (January 13), and more undoubtedly elsewhere. Such ads shouldn't be taken for granted. There were features seemingly ignored in the trades by their distributors. I looked but could not find any trade support for Universal's There's Always Tomorrow when I posted on that 1956 release a few months ago. Touch Of Evil was announced as available to help commemorate U-I's 45th Anniversary Drive, that celebration having been kicked off with earlier in the season's Man Of A Thousand Faces. What happened I think was merely a rearrangement of priorities on the part of U-I's sales department. The Tarnished Angels had opened well in selected playdates over the holidays. Holdovers suggested it would be 1958's bigger attraction, especially in the wake of the stars/director team's Written On The Wind, a $4.4 million rentals blockbuster and Universal's top earner during 1957. There seemed more promise too in The Lady Takes a Flyer, their upcoming Lana Turner/Jeff Chandler comedy deemed worthy of double page two-color trade ads. Universal merchandisers were chasing dollars, after all. They cared from nothing about Orson Welles, the man who'd done Kane (and flopped with it).

Few minded Touch Of Evil being trashy. There was plenty of room in the market for that. Universal was set to Explode More Boxoffice Dynamite on January 28 with Damn Citizen! (why didn't RKO think of such an exclamatory title for Kane?). There was one they didn't offer with the 45th Anniversary Drive, what with its unapologetic serving of Murder, Gambling, Assault, Girls, Bribery, and Dope. U-I's campaign for Touch Of Evil was a model of decorum beside this. I haven't seen Damn Citizen!, would guess it's trash ... but here's the difference ... coherent trash. Touch Of Evil was thought unmanageable from delivery of Welles' cut, Universal being confused, then indignant. Producer on the lot (and former Welles associate) William Alland said everyone there resented the hell out of OW. Welles would years later reflect that Touch Of Evil was just too dark and black and strange for them. Universal heads felt, justifiably so, that if you're going to make exploitation movies, at least do them simply enough so a target audience, already distracted by corn dogs, soda pop, and in-car fondling, can understand. Touch Of Evil ended up too dense and sophisticated for patronage figured to attend, those efforts to reshoot and rejigger it making matters only worse.

For all his directorial pyrotechnics, was Welles also pandering to increased numbers of drive-in sensation hunters (as Hitchcock would, and more successfully, with Psycho)? There's a footnote in Glenn Erickson's excellent Touch Of Evil DVD review wherein a reader shares a memo he'd acquired between Welles and TOE producer Albert Zugsmith. Quoting OW: To keep them away from the popcorn stand, I've invented a nasty little outrage for the section you felt might tend to drag in terms of melodrama. I agree with Erickson that this is probably the infamous Janet Leigh hotel scene Welles is referring to. It wasn't Shakespeare and he was obviously on board with realities of U-I's marketplace ... but did Welles go overboard? His hotel's an ordeal beyond even what Hitchcock would put us through, Psycho's carnage being fun even as it was frightful. TOE's drug-tinged gang assault is surely one of the decade's nastiest mayhems, not easy getting through even if one grants the notion of Welles sending up exploitation pics with it. Could he have reasonably expected studio overseers to be hep to his jest? Still, Universal got all the trailer bait they needed from the segment (and used even more footage therefrom in their recut version than Welles intended), with disturber images left over for utilization in TOE's lobby card set. This was to be her wedding night, intones the narrator for 1958's preview as we move into Leigh's violated cabin with her attackers. OW was right at least for knowing his over-the-top sequence would be catnip for marketers. With a Production Code still in force in 1958, you wonder how Universal ever got a seal for Touch Of Evil.

Thanks much to Mike Cline for the Touch Of Evil montage.

Joan Crawford Breaks Crime's Glass Ceiling

There used to be lots of what folks called "crook dramas" coming out of Hollywood. They were precursors to gangster pics we know better. Crime gone mainstream with Cagney and Robinson in the thirties followed movie years in which such activity was regarded an aberration confined to bleakest of slums. Talkies gave hoodlums glamour. Silent underworld stylists looked to Griffith and his Musketeers Of Pig Alley for guidance. That one dated to 1912, as did the novel on which 1930's Paid was based. Within The Law had been adapted twice sans voices, but with cop and robber tales largely moribund with the decade's start, it seemed well enough to try again. The Unholy Three had been recently done over with sound and was profitable. There remained critical and audience distaste where gang enterprise was concerned, however. Real-life's charismatic Al Capone and brethren had not yet been translated to the screen. That would require sophisticated application of sound and all its possibilities. For the meantime, there was Paid and baby steps it took toward a full-out crime cycle to come. That first January week of 1931 found Paid sharing Broadway dates with Little Caesar and The Criminal Code, two that pointed ways to modernized mayhem but lacked enticing novelty of Joan Crawford as focal point of illegality, a provocative riposte to notions about the gentler sex. Here was onetime's dancing daughter marched through prison corridors, running rackets, and undergoing Third Degrees, something new in Crawford's line and plenty hot for viewers inured to mugs like Chaney, Wally Beery, and George Bancroft smuggling kegs and ducking bulls.

Joan Crawford's determination to grab Paid's plum part was stuff of fan driven drama in days when magazines bought with dimes clocked progress of youngsters clawing up studio ladders. Barbers to butchers knew how diligently Crawford chased fame. Seeking closure of jazz baby ruts, she felt opportunity was past due knocking for red meat of Mary Dugans and Divorcees rival Norma Shearer essayed. You'd think Photoplay readers occupied front offices for their seeming participation in star-building process. When a Crawford got breaks, they took bows for helping manage it via letters demanding fare to better spotlight her talents. Shearer was indeed set for Paid but came up with child and thus passed. Half any movie's excitement was generated from casting sagas and joy for a coup like Crawford's. Her getting there was consummation of readership's desire and never mind fact she was learning craft on the job. Was Crawford's Paid performance worthy of such interest (ours if not hers)? She uncorks genies of pent-up expression from A to Zed, starting off low-key and later soaring with pop-eyes and verbal detonation a talking industry made possible. Come away from female driven precodes and chances are you'll remember best scenes where heroines dole out pieces of mind to men who've wronged them. Barbara Stanwyck made a career of such fireworks, with Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, and Crawford as of Paid striking blows for embattled womanhood. Struggles onscreen and off were won, lost, sometimes conceded, but seldom without the fight.

Joan Crawford throws down her gauntlet in Paid's opening scene. Sentenced to hard time on what we know is a frame, she vows revenge upon release and gets it. Precodes were often how-to's on technique of rackets, one among many elements post-'34 enforcement meant to curb. Methodology applied to "heart-balm" schemes is explained thoroughly enough for patrons to try at home, its victims foolish millionaires who always have it coming. Crawford's parolee doesn't commit actual crimes, her operating just within the law being cue for the title of Paid's source novel, so ways are cleared for a happy finish. What distinguishes Paid is novelty of ordeals she withstands hitherto restricted to men. Crawford takes prison showers, communal ones with black inmates, by itself undoubted fuel for word-of-mouth that yielded $415,000 in Paid profits. There's also Joan in handcuffs, getting the hot lamp treatment, and generally roughhoused to levels of bondage fantasy new even to crowds weaned on then-recent The Big House, itself an envelope pusher with regard harsh realities of time in stir. Both were hits that confirmed a market for life seen through grimy glass (or bars). MGM's glamour polish to come obscures a previous record of shows like these (plus The Secret Six, Dance, Fools, Dance, Beast Of The City, others) fully equal to Warners for grit. Imitators wouldn't lag far behind. Columbia's Parole Girl of 1933 retold Paid's story near-verbatim and in 67 minutes. Someone might (should) have sued, but where was sufficient Metro staff to flag so many copycats? Parole Girl turned up lately on TCM. Mae Clarke does the Crawford part with more conviction but frankly less oomph. Hers was greater talent of the two, but what Joan projected was actress ambition beyond what any role satisfied and a public's rooting interest in that assured she'd be the winner who'd take all.

Washington Not-So Merry Go Round

Let's say I'm in Paris and Olivia DeHavilland's asked me by for a spot of tea (she just turned 94, by the way). Rather than ask about Errol Flynn or Gone With The Wind, I zero in on Sonny Tufts and Government Girl. Olivia's automatic response mechanism goes on the fritz and she's speechless. What would the lady remember about this obscurity done under protest sixty-seven years ago? TCM played Government Girl last week and will again on July 12. Watch it and know that Hollywood rationed good movies during WWII surely as the rest did coffee and sugar. Was Daryl Zanuck and certain directors (John Ford among them) right in saying the industry went thoroughly to dogs while they were away in uniform? Olivia de Havilland had been loaned by home studio Warner Bros. to David Selznick, who then transferred his lease to RKO for this would-be comedy in 1943. De Havilland spent breaks on Government Girl preparing a lawsuit against WB to abrogate the contract she called enslavement. Was this distraction cause of a performance substituting mugging for mirth, with result you'd be charitable to call comedic? Critics and trade knew Government Girl was a barker, but customers turned out anyway. RKO's $716,000 spent on the negative brought back two million worldwide thanks to upended times when theatres ran all night and misfires claimed reward same as features we'd call good. Government Girl is a time capsule so topical you need back issues of The Washington Post to stay even with it, like a newsreel with a barely discernible storyline. Watch and glean plenty about life and circumstances around our nation's capital during wartime, then wonder why modern instructors don't use documents like Government Girl to show what DC was like then (oops ... nearly forgot ... no one teaches history anymore). Comedy bad to a point of sublimity amounts to icing on this fallen cake.

There was a brace of wartime laffers about housing shortage in Washington. Anyone going there knew there were no rooms to let. Audiences got saucy fun out of men and women fighting over sleep space and possibility they'd have to share (like in The More The Merrier). If you were Tyrone Power giving up a suite to Anne Baxter in Crash Dive, then naturally she'd be expected to slide over for company. Ten women to one man was a scintillating prospect for both sexes, a real Sadie Hawkins homefront that movies loved exploring. Even food shortages gained erotic currency, as witness Anne Shirley's arousal over a pair of beefsteaks she consumes in Government Girl. Pictures made for the moment are pleasurable in ways they never contemplated then. We'd call a recurring situation of a newly married couple desperately seeking rooms for consummation labored and unduly repetitive, but what about patrons in 1943 who'd encountered that very snafu on their own rushed wedding days? These crowds knew realities we don't, so were all in on jokes we don't fully get. It's to them Government Girl spoke, clumsily perhaps, of shared experience and ways of life disrupted by a war they preferred laughing about to worrying over.

Dumb comedies sometimes make up in energy what they lack in inspiration. There's lots to enjoy in Government Girl once you surrender to its assinity. A free-wheeling motorcycle careens past Washington sites of interest thanks to a second-unit filming on-location, a welcome city tour circa 1943 impeded but mildly by Olivia de Havilland and Sonny Tufts gesticulating against a process screen. We get pratfalls aplenty and Olivia skids often across floors in stocking feet. There occurs a run in her nylon at one point and you almost hear wartime women groan with empathy. De Havilland forces fun throughout Government Girl (a drunk scene she effects is like application of bamboo stalks). Even Preston Sturges would have been hard put to bleed humor from this stone. Was Olivia hardened by Warner ultimatums arriving daily? Laugh, damn you all! is the mandate she delivers, yet somehow that endears me to her miscast struggle and lends de Havilland's slapsticking a kind of tenacious grandeur. Her mood couldn't have been enhanced by co-star Sonny Tufts, a flash still sizzling in the pan when the two were co-starred. He was 4-F and just off So Proudly We Hail at Paramount, an aw-shucks I'm no actor sort that glowed briefly while real stars were off fighting. Sonny tippled lots and knew pics he made were junk. Driving by marquees bearing his name, the big galoot wanted to stop and warn patrons against going inside. His disdain for Government Girl was at least the equal of de Havilland's. Chemistry the two share is summed up by a running gag where they throw darts at cartooned blow-ups of Hitler and Tojo. At moments like this, Olivia may well have considered chucking the whole actress thing and heading back to secretarial school. She and Sonny's clinch at the fade is about as credible as Bugs burying the hatchet with Daffy.