Weekend Watch (with special guest Josh Larsen)

We occasionally like to close out the week by giving some space to friends of The Reveal to share their recommendation for movies that might not be on your radar. This week we’re joined by Josh Larsen. Josh is the co-host of the long-running Filmspotting podcast (the mothership podcast to The Next Picture Show, co-hosted in part by your Reveal writers) and moderator of Cinema Interruptus, four days of communal film criticism taking place Aug. 11-14 at Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center. After screening Robert Altman’s 1992 classic The Player in its entirety on Aug. 11, participants will gather on subsequent days to revisit the movie scene by scene, interrupting with comments and questions along the way. Single-day tickets and a four-day package are available via the Gene Siskel Film Center. 

For his pick, Josh has chosen Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, which opens with an extended continuous shot that is directly referenced and formally imitated at the start of The Player.

It isn’t long into Touch of Evil when you realize that anything goes. The movie takes place in a border town and it has adopted a freewheeling, Tijuana temperament to match—kicked off by one of cinema’s most famous continuous opening shots. Not only does Charlton Heston refuse to alter his Moses persona for this late film noir, he doesn’t even bother to adopt an accent for the part of Mexican law enforcement official Miguel “Mike” Vargas. As the picture opens, Vargas has recently married an American blonde named Susan (Janet Leigh). Their honeymoon is interrupted when a car bombing sets off a convoluted crime plot that will involve Susan’s kidnapping at the hands of a gang of lecherous druggies and Vargas’ run-ins with corrupt American police captain Hank Quinlan (a corpulent Orson Welles).

Welles also directed the film, emphasizing—as he did in 1955’s Mr. Arkadin—the grotesqueness of himself and many of his characters. Even Marlene Dietrich, in a late-career bit part as a brothel madam, looks like she could be part of a circus sideshow. Also like Arkadin, Touch of Evil was taken from Welles by the studio and reedited without his consent. (Working with a legendary 58-page memo written by Welles, film historians restored the movie for a 2000 theatrical re-release and DVD version.) No amount of studio interference, however, could corral the loopiness that pulses through Touch of Evil; it’s too ingrained in the movie’s blood. There is Akim Tamiroff, for instance, in eyeliner and a disobedient hairpiece sending hoods after Leigh’s Susan. When they stash her in an isolated hotel room and proceed to throw a drug-fueled party, scored by none less than Henry Mancini, the picture threatens to turn into Reefer Madness. Albeit with the visual panache of the man behind Citizen Kane.