i spent a month and a half this winter stuck inside my house watching movies, and touch of evil was the best of the bunch that i saw. this is definitely the direction that i would LOVE to see the orpheum go in the future, so get out there and support this.
universal didn't like the cut originally submitted by welles in 1958 and recut the film into a terrible mess that led welles to write a 58- page memo upon seeing the studio's edit. it wasn;t until 1998 that the film was finally recut according to this detailed memo, and i can only assume that this is the version that we're gonna be seeing on the screen at the orpheum.
from the orpheum's page about the film:
"Generally considered as the ultimate Film Noir (and the last film of the genre), TOUCH OF EVIL is certainly one of the most macabre, bizarre poignant films ever produced in Hollywood. The director Orson Welles is of course the man who made CITIZEN KANE, but many Welles aficionados such as Peter Bogdanovich actually consider TOUCH OF EVIL better than KANE; as a matter of fact, the best film Welles has ever directed."
you should wander round the corner to four star and pick up the complete mr. arkadin, another welles film tat has been available in a number of versions in varying degrees of completeness, or the two-disc touch of evil set we have that includes both the 1998 cut and the original universal cut.
3 comments:
I love this movie. It is as excellent as movies get, pretty much. And, whoa nelly, is Orson Welles HUGE in it.
Last noir ever?!
that was from the text coming from the orpheums page, but wikipedia, that knower of all things worth knowing, backs it up too for the most part, calling it "one of the last examples of film noir in the genre's classic era (from the early 1940s until the late 1950s)."
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