Coming soon to a theater near us (specifically, Sun-Ray Cinema) is a year-long series of Orson Welles classicswhich no connoisseur of film, or just plain movie-lover, will want to pass up. Dubbed “101 Years of Orson Welles,” the line-up includes two showings each month (from 35mm prints, no less) of a different film with Welles either as director or star, and sometimes both.
Appropriately, the schedule begins in late February with Citizen Kane, usually voted by experts as the greatest American movie ever made. I certainly concur. And to see Kane on the big screen means I can check one more item off my bucket list.
Psyched about Sun-Ray’s upcoming series, I decided to again watch two of my favorite Welles films, both recently released on Blu-ray, and both will look even bigger and better when they get the Sun-Ray treatment later this year. In both films, Welles directs himself in a supporting role as the villain, memorably nasty in the first and massively complex in the second.
The Stranger (1946) was Welles’ first credited feature after Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and though it was the director’s most popular film ever upon its initial release, the movie still stays in the shadows of the two prior classics and others to come. A solid thriller anyway in the best tradition of Alfred Hitchcock and film noir, The Stranger may lack subtlety but the style shines through.
Welles plays escaped Nazi mastermind Franz Kindler, who’s taken up residence in Connecticut at a small college using the name Professor Charles Rankin. On his trail is Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson), an indefatigable government agent who arrives in town on the day Rankin is marrying the beautiful Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), daughter of a Supreme Court Justice.
Much like Hitchcock’s superior Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Welles infects the idyllic American town with a dark dose of reality with his the diabolical Kindler/Rankin, who manages to fool just about everyone before his real self is revealed. The film’s set piece is a clock tower where Welles stages a suspenseful climax, much like Hitchcock’s Saboteur and Vertigo.
Welles was often criticized by his enemies as being egotistical – always giving himself the best roles and dialogue. The Stranger, however, is one film that readily refutes that argument, as the director lets Robinson (a villain in his early days) rise to the occasion as American spokesman. Welles’ performance is sinister, too, the Nazi’s mask slipping briefly at a dinner table when he dismisses Karl Marx as a Jew, not a German.
In Touch of Evil 12 years later in 1958, Welles is near the very top of his form, though it would take decades for the movie to achieve the shape and form he originally intended. The history of the editing and re-editing of Touch of Evil from its initial release to the present version(s) available is another story in itself. As was often the case with Welles, studio executives had other ideas about what the finished film should be.
Touch of Evil subsequently bombed in the U.S., but was a big hit abroad at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair where François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (then fledgling critics) awarded it top prize.
The only reason Welles was allowed to direct the film in the first place was due to the insistence of star Charlton Heston, a tribute to the actor’s artistic insights. (Heston was Judah Ben-Hur the next year, nabbing the 1960 Oscar for Best Actor.) The complex plot, made even more so by Welles’ contributions, involved police corruption, drugs, murder, and a variety of memorable minor characters, played by Marlene Dietrich, Dennis Weaver, Akim Tamiroff, and Mercedes McCambridge.
The film’s leads are Heston as a Mexican law officer, Janet Leigh as his harried wife, and Welles as the overweight, unshaven dirty cop with his hand in everything, despite an intellect and conscience that know better. Great performances all around, with dazzling but unobtrusive camera movement, everything orchestrated to the shadings of classic noir, elevate Touch of Evil above its genre roots.
The movie is classic Orson Welles, which is practically a cinematic tautology.
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