silver nitrate notes

Touch of Evil and the Opening That Survived

28 sep 2025

Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) is his last American studio film. Universal hired him to direct at the insistence of Charlton Heston, who had been offered the lead role and had asked who was directing. Universal said Welles would merely be acting. Heston said he had thought they had meant directing. Universal, rather than lose Heston, gave Welles the director's chair. Welles was not again given the director's chair on an American studio production.

The cinematographer was Russell Metty (1906-1978), a Universal contract cinematographer who had photographed a wide range of studio pictures and who approached Welles with the wary respect appropriate to a director who might or might not be able to deliver. Metty and Welles, to their mutual surprise, worked together well. What they produced is a film whose visual ambition exceeds anything Universal had seen in ten years.

The opening shot is the one everyone cites. Three and a half minutes, unbroken, following a car containing a planted bomb from a small Mexican town across the US border and into a hotel parking lot. The camera rises, lowers, crosses streets, re-enters the path of the car, loses it, finds it. Welles had the shot storyboarded to the frame. Metty had to light the entire route in advance, using available streetlights where possible and supplementing with instruments positioned at specific points along the track. The take required several nights of shooting. When Welles got the take he wanted, he used it.

Universal, on seeing Welles's rough cut, took the film away from him. They re-cut it, added scenes directed by another director, and released it in a shorter version. Welles wrote a fifty-eight-page memo to the studio itemising his objections. Universal ignored most of them. The film was released, failed commercially, and was largely forgotten until a restoration in 1998 based on the Welles memo produced a version closer to what he had originally made. The opening shot survived the studio's re-cut unaltered. It is the one sequence of the film that is, beyond dispute, the Welles film.

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sources
[1] Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: One-Man Band. Jonathan Cape, 2015.
[2] Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles vs the Hollywood Studios. Chicago Review, 2005.
[3] Welles, Orson. Memo from Welles to Universal on Touch of Evil. 1957 (reproduced in Criterion edition).
[4] Stubbs, John. "Touch of Evil: The Restoration of a Welles Film." Film Quarterly, Fall 1998.