Touch of Evil

The border is crossed and recrossed in this seminal noir, eventually double-crossed and reedited by the studio. Director Orson Welles constructs an unsettling space among seedy motels, baroque brothels, and soiled apartments, the haunts of sundry dead-enders and delinquents. At the top of the heap is Hank Quinlan (Welles), a grubby police detective who never saw a frame he couldn’t picture. When a car bomb rolls across the border from Los Robles (actually shot in Venice, California), Quinlan is joined in his investigation by “Mike” Vargas (Charlton Heston), a Mexican narc who has just wed gringa Janet Leigh.