The Evil That Welles Did

Hank Quinlan (Welles) dispatches Sgt. Menzies (Joseph Calleia)

The reconstructed cut of Touch of Evil (1958) is out on a new 4K UHD Blu-ray from Kino-Lorber. The 111-minute reconstruction has all the burn of the 98-minute version we saw in years past and something epic besides. If the boutique UHD industry (Kino, Criterion, Arrow, etc.) had rescanned only this one classic movie and not dozens of others, the industry would have proved its worth and paid for itself ten times over. About four or five dozen — roughly — old American movies merit a meticulous rescan like this (a good discussion could be had debating titles), but Evil is just about the moviest movie in that pool. Orson Welles created an H-bomb out of material that other noir directors (Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Andre de Toth, Anthony Mann) would have used to create an entertaining genre melodrama. You’d have to reach back to G. W. Pabst and the Russians in the 1920s to match the abundance of artistry here — the mise-en-scène, the montage, the crane shots, the baroque angles and perspectives, the tracking, the deep well of inventiveness. Some of what Welles did here is outlandishly visionary and grotesque, overshadowing much of the experimentation since him, even the handful of greats he influenced — Sam Peckinpah or David Lynch, for example (Welles went further with audio than Peckinpah or Lynch ever did). In the late 1950s, this movie must have hit audiences the way Eraserhead hit college students in the late 1970s. Remember what you thought when you first saw that? Both movies took years to find their audience.

The Greatness of Audacity

Mesmerizer. Jack Barrymore

In answer to the question: What is the greatest American movie performance of the early sound era? Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931) or Scarface (1932)? Chaplin in City Lights (1931)? Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931)? Jeanne Eagels in The Letter (1929)? Marie Dressler in Dinner at Eight (1933) or the barely remembered Emma (1932)?

John Barrymore (Broadway’s Orson Welles) in Svengali (1931) unpacks theatrical traditions and his own sly, self-referential archness into a variety of grand gestures—the sing-song accents, interrogative upturns, and squeaky upper registers of the Eastern European Jew; the static postures and bearing of the angular nobles in the Eisenstein historical epics (Barrymore is made up to resemble Nikolay Cherkasov in Ivan the Terrible); and the tortured self-doubts and sadism of the Shakespearean villains. Barrymore is so audacious that all these styles blend seamlessly—he gets to the essence of the art of acting: creating a character that is both lifelike and larger than life. When his great death scene occurs, you expect him to spring uncannily back to life. And the special effects in the mesmerism scenes have sensual heat: Svengali’s eyes glow like molten metal.

Watching John Barrymore spellbind in Svengali is like watching a fabled stage performance from some long-lost age of theater. He stalks the floorboards in high-heeled boots and overcoat, as gaunt as a vampire. But his voice and mien are so commanding that the gothicism never degenerates into camp—Barrymore is no mandarin nut job. Like watching Karloff’s terrifying, confused monster in Frankenstein or Sam Jaffe’s nebbishy Grand Duke Peter in Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934), the experience is too appallingly profound for camp.