Back to Touch of Evil

1958 was a great year to work in Hollywood. I remember reading an interview with Orson Welles about his directing style: he said that the abilities of the crew allowed him to make "Touch of Evil". That the highly skilled camera operators allowed him to make those camera movements and that, after 1960, as the studios declined, he had to change his style to suit the decreased resources and talents available to him.

Having seen "Touch of Evil" again last night I can only describe this as an "expressive" style: that the camera not only moves to track and frame, but to "express" a feeling or idea. Certainly there's been a lot of head scratching about the point of some of these movements (the camera dollies upward as it's pointed at an almost motionless scene: the motel in the desert, with maybe a little sand swirling around behind it). It adds a "kinetic" element that adds a sense of imbalance and foreboding. It occured to me that this is the kind of movie that Martin Scorcese is always trying to make.
And I never noticed all that music before: the "teenager music" used to terrorize Janet Leigh in the motel, the "pianola" music from Marlene Dietrich's saloon, and the carefully changing music of the first shot: I think this is an element of the "restored" version of the movie, so perhaps that's why I never noticed it: as the camera moves along the street, the music changes every time we pass the front of a different bar. It's like we're stuck in Pottersville in "It's a Wonderful Life."