Mexican-U.S. Relations: A Touch of Evil

Leigh, Heston in Touch of Evil

Leigh, Heston in Touch of Evil

Film Friday

I have been teaching an adult film class this semester in conjunction with a fascinating exhibit on fences that our college’s art gallery has mounted with help from the Smithsonian Museum. My contribution is to exhibit and talk about films that focus on fences, walls, and other types of boundaries.

This past Tuesday I showed Orson Welles’s masterpiece A Touch of Evil. Although released in 1958, it is remarkably relevant today, especially with regard to our border situation with Mexico. I’ll explain how after I interpret the film.

Touch of Evil has one of the most famous openings in the history of the movies, a three and a half minute tracking shot which begins with a close-up of a bomb being placed in the trunk of a car and then follows it across the Mexican border into the United States.  There it blows up, killing the millionaire driver and his “girlfriend.” Because it is an international incident, both a Mexican official (Vargas, played by Charlton Heston) and an American lawman (Quinlan, played by Welles) are involved. Almost immediately the two are at odds.

I’ll just dwell on the border theme rather than go into all of the plot’s twists and turns. The film challenges the perception that the United States is a place of order and restraint while Mexico is a dark realm of sin and corruption, the id to America’s superego. At first, to be sure, the stereotype seems to hold. Americans cross the border to attend seedy Mexican bars and engage in sexual trysts. The white millionaire crosses over party with his lady friend, his daughter is attracted to a Mexican shoe clerk, and Susie (Janet Leigh) marries Vargas. It is as though all are turning their backs on 1950’s squeaky clean America to visit their repressed subconscious.

That Welles has this as a theme becomes abundantly clear later in the film when Leigh has been kidnapped, drugged and placed in a seedy hotel room. As she tosses and turns in her sleep, we see the grotesque face of a man strangled by Quinlan hovering above her, sporadically revealed by the flashing neon lights as raucous nightclub music filters in through the window. She may be an innocent American girl, but in her dark dreams there are other forces at work.

It soon becomes clear that Welles has only invoked the boundary between Mexico and America to break it down. That the famous tracking shot includes both sides of the border in an unbroken sequence makes it clear that America is more closely connected to Mexico than it admits. For parts of the movie, one is not sure which side of the border one is on—America doesn’t look that different from Mexico. In fact, at one point Susie offends hers Mexican husband by insisting that she be taken to a hotel on her side of the border, where she thinks she will be safer and more comfortable.  As it turns out, the only hotel open is a seedy set of cabins owned by the very people she wants to escape from. Uncle Joe Grandi may seem Mexican but he is an American citizen. All border towns bring out the worst in a country, Vargas says at one point. Put another way, all countries have a side to them that they pretend doesn’t exist.

We see this side in the figure of Quinlan, a rogue cop who has been so unhinged by the murder of his wife years before (no one is ever convicted of the crime) that he now plants evidence to frame those that he intuits (correctly as it turns out) to be the perpetrators. The hard work of collecting evidence and building a case is not important to Quinlan, just obtaining convictions. To which Vargas points out, “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”

The film’s theme is highlighted when one compares it to an even more famous film that it influenced. I’m convinced that Touch of Evil freed up Alfred Hitchcock to make Psycho two years later. Hitchcock in the 1950’s was feeling suffocated by America’s sunny exterior and by the high budget technicolor films that he was making for the studios. Even when he pried beneath the surface—say, by turning all-American-boy Jimmy Stewart into a voyeur in 1954’s Rear Window—he still had to clean it all up at the end. But when he watched Janet Leigh get assaulted in a rundown motel in a black and white film, he saw his chance to show America what really lay beneath its nice and smiling Tony Curtis surface.  He deliberately made a low budget movie with a drive-in feel to it.

The only part of Touch of Evil that I find dated is Vargas’s statement, “Susie, one of the longest borders on earth is right here between your country and mine. An open border. Fourteen hundred miles without a single machine gun in place.” Now there are plenty of guns in place.

Otherwise, the same dynamic rules.  Americans today may see Mexico as a place of lawlessness where local gang lords routinely kill police and others to control a drug trade that brings in millions. But their major customers are Americans and the guns they use to kill are made in America. A border indeed brings out the worst in a country, as we are seeing in Arizona’s racial profiling laws which target those who are brown skinned.

A single tracking shot continues to join the two countries.

Addendum:

In case you are interested, the other films I’m teaching in my mini-class are:

Jean Renoir, Grande Illusion – prison camp walls, national and class boundaries
Franco Brusati, Bread and Chocolate – Swiss-Italian border
Wolfgang Becker, Goodbye Lenin
– Berlin Wall

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