Touch Of Evil

Touch of Evil (1958) is a great American film noir crime thriller, dark mystery, and cult classic - another technical masterpiece from writer-director-actor Orson Welles. It was Orson Welles' fifth Hollywood film - and it was his last American film. Touch of Evil was the last great film noir during the so-called 'classic' era of noirs, from the early 1940s to the late 1950s.

Although unappreciated in its time in the US, a box-office failure, and criticized as artsy, campy, sleazy pulp-fiction trash, the low-budget film - in retrospect - has been ranked as the classic B-movie of the silver screen. (It was met with rave reviews in Europe, and won Best Picture at the Brussels Film Festival).

This great noir was shot on location in Venice, California rather than in the film's setting of Mexico (possibly the border town of Tijuana but called Los Robles in the film). The film's script, written in about two weeks, was loosely based upon Whit Masterson's (a pseudonym for Wade Miller - aka Robert Wade and William Miller) 1956 pulp novel, Badge of Evil.

It was regarded as a rebellious, unorthodox, bizarre, and outrageously exaggerated film, affronting respectable 1950's sensibilities, with controversial themes including racism, betrayal of friends, sexual ambiguity, frameups, drugs, and police corruption of power. Its central character is an obsessed, driven, and bloated police captain ("a lousy cop") a basically tragic figure who has a "touch of evil" in his enforcement of the law.

A good site for a touch of evil: http://skyjude.users.btopenworld.com/touchofevil.htm
Here are some video grabs :