«I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do survives them; good is often buried with their bones." Thus William Shakespeare's Mark Antony transforms a funeral oration into the most subtle of trials. Orson Welles knew those lines by heart: in 1937, at the age of twenty-two, he brought Julius Caesar to Broadway with his Mercury Theatre, dressing the conspirators in uniforms that evoked Mussolini's Italy.
Twenty years later, in a filthy border town between Mexico and the United States, he would entrust Marlene Dietrich with an equally ambiguous epitaph for another enormous and rotten man: «In his own way he was also a great man. But what does it matter what you say about a dead person? That man is called Hank Quinlan, and cinema hasn't stopped talking about him for almost seventy years.
The infernal Quinlan (Touch of Evil), the noir masterpiece directed and starring Orson Welles in 1958, returns to cinemas from 5 October 2026, restored in 4K and distributed by the Cineteca di Bologna.
This isn't just any version. The 111-minute reconstructed director's cut arrives in theaters, made in 1998 on the basis of the 58 pages of instructions with which Welles, ousted from editing at the behest of Universal, had attempted to save his film. Alongside him, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Calleia and Akim Tamiroff star.
And in the year in which Christopher Nolan filled theaters with his Odyssey shot entirely in IMAX, it is quite impressive to remember that one of the most famous odysseys of the camera lasts just over three minutes. Without a single break.
The plot, taken from the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson, starts from that explosion. Captain Hank Quinlan, a local police legend, immediately spots the culprit in a young Mexican, Sanchez. Vargas, who sacrificed his honeymoon to follow the investigations, however, realizes that the dynamite found in the suspect's bathroom appeared in a shoebox that had been empty a few minutes earlier.
Thus begins a duel between law and instinct, between guarantees and fabricated evidence. “In free countries a policeman must enforce the law, first and foremost, and the law protects both the guilty and the innocent,” warns Vargas. “Our job is difficult,” Quinlan replies. And the prosecutor lands the blow: it's only easy where dictators are in charge.
Certain. But "he who fights with monsters must guard against becoming a monster himself", warned Friedrich Nietzsche, and Vargas, who turns a bar upside down with his bare hands halfway through the film, risks learning this the hard way.
Welles created a monster for himself, part fairy-tale ogre and part tavern King Lear. Padding, heavy make-up, an unkempt beard, an injured leg and a stick, the look of someone who has stopped drinking but not wanting to.
Giancarlo De Cataldo accurately described the vertigo that the character causes: on the one hand a bandit in uniform, dirty, greedy, corrupt; on the other, an investigative genius capable of sniffing out the culprit "while the body is still warm". How can you not admire it?
Roger Ebert, including the film among his Great Movies, read a self-portrait in it: a man who broods over old grudges and lives on the obsession of control, just like the director that Hollywood was unable to tame. And there is already, in that carcass that is dragged between taverns and police stations, the Falstaff that Welles would have played in 1965 in Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight). Shakespeare, once again.
The secret heart of the film, however, is Pete Menzies, the sergeant as faithful as a retriever, played by Joseph Calleia, a Maltese actor whom Welles had admired since, as a ten-year-old, he saw him at the theater in New York. Quinlan took a bullet in his place years ago, and has been limping ever since.
It will be the relationship between the two men, made up of gratitude, loyalty and disillusionment, that will transform into one of the most tragic issues in the film. Because in The Infernal Quinlan no loyalty is eternal and every rumor, sooner or later, risks becoming a test.
Hollywood paradoxes: without Charlton Heston the film would never have been by Welles. Fresh from The Ten Commandments, the actor asked Universal who he would direct; They told him that they didn't know yet, but that Welles had already been cast as Quinlan.
«Why not let him direct the film too? He's pretty good,” suggested Cecil B. DeMille's Moses, who the next year would become Ben-Hur and a decade later curse the monkeys on the beach at the Statue of Liberty.
Welles rewrote the script in a few days, moved the action from San Diego to the border and transformed the protagonist, the American Mitch Holt, into the Mexican Miguel Vargas. Heston thus found himself with a mustache and a face darkened by greasepaint: a choice that would cause discussion today, but which at the time was used by Welles to describe American prejudice from the point of view of those who suffer it.
Janet Leigh, yes, the mother of future scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, was hired with a telegram from Welles before her agent even knew anything about it and forced to film with a broken arm hidden from the camera. She is a bold Susie who ends up a prisoner in an isolated motel in the desert, entrusted to a neurotic and nervous night porter, Dennis Weaver, the Chester of the western series Gunsmoke, invited by the director to improvise.
Two years later Alfred Hitchcock would send her to another motel, and we know how that ended.
In the meantime, Uncle Joe Grandi's thugs, an Akim Tamiroff suspended between the grotesque and the pathetic, drug her, led by an unrecognizable Mercedes McCambridge, with her hair cut short and dyed with shoe polish by Welles himself.
The appearances are a game of masks: Joseph Cotten, an associate since Citizen Kane, plays the medical examiner without appearing in the titles; Zsa Zsa Gabor, friend of the producer Albert Zugsmith, the owner of a nightclub.
Then there's Tanya. Josef von Sternberg's former Blue Angel, here a retired fortune teller, agreed to participate for the union minimum wage. Raven wig, the look of someone who has already seen everything, a house where a pianola plays the tune that Henry Mancini, the future father of Moon River and the Pink Panther, cut to measure for her.
Quinlan, exhausted, asks her to predict his future: «Come on, read my future for me». The answer is a plaque: "You haven't got anything". And faced with his questioning gaze, the fortune teller deals the final blow: «Your future's all used up».
You don't have any left, your future is all consumed. Sold out like a torn note, drained like the last bottle of bourbon, burned like Edna St. Vincent Millay's candle, burned at both ends.
The Italian dubbing of the director's cut chose a formula that was more moral than accounting, "What you had, you threw away", but the original is crueler, since it doesn't accuse: it notes.
A few minutes on scene and the most memorable lines of the film. Welles understood that a legend doesn't need space. All she needs is the right light.
The production history of The Infernal Quinlan is a noir within a noir. Filming took place in Venice, California, it was Aldous Huxley who suggested that decayed suburb to Welles, with its fake Venetian canals and oil wells, between February and April 1957.
Even the title was imposed: producer Albert Zugsmith transformed Badge of Evil into Touch of Evil, and Welles considered it silly. Nomen omen, one might say, given that one touch was enough to ruin everything.
Then the director edited the film until Universal locked him out of slow motion. While he left for Mexico to chase his Don Quixote, the studio re-edited the film in a more conventional way and entrusted Harry Keller with some new explanatory scenes.
On December 5, 1957, Welles, having viewed the new version, gave the head of production Edward Muhl a 58-page memorandum: a plea and at the same time a cinema lesson, detailed down to the single sound effect. It remained a dead letter.
In 1958 the film was released in a drastically shortened version, about 95 minutes, combined in a double bill with The Female Animal with Hedy Lamarr, like any other B-series title.
Europe understood first. At the 1958 Brussels World's Fair film festival the film received major international recognition, helping to consolidate a critical reputation that would arrive more slowly in the United States.
In the 1970s, Robert Epstein, a film professor at UCLA, found a 108-minute copy, the so-called preview version, in the Universal archives.
Finally, in 1998, producer Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch, editor and sound designer of Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, took the memorandum into their own hands and tried to translate onto the screen, as far as possible, the indications left by Welles using the surviving material.
The director's original cut, in fact, no longer exists: a true director's cut remains impossible. The 1998 version is the closest to it.
The screening scheduled for the Cannes Film Festival was canceled at the last moment due to legal threats from his daughter Beatrice Welles, who had not been consulted. When he saw the film, however, he changed his mind: that reconstruction, he later said, corresponded much more closely to his father's intentions than the versions that had circulated for decades.
The 4K restoration that the Cineteca di Bologna is now bringing to theaters returns Metty's black and white with a depth that no television will ever be able to match. Because this is a film of sweaty skin, of neon signs, of black people swallowing faces. Big screen stuff, shared darkness.
«It's not a detective film; it is a moral hallucination", writes the Cineteca di Bologna when presenting the re-edition. And that's exactly how it is.
The infernal Quinlan is a twilight western disguised as a thriller, a treatise on power that devours itself, a Shakespearean tragedy set in a frontier tavern.
Seen again today, it is striking for its restless modernity: the border as a place where the law bends, prejudice that becomes an investigative method, the positive hero who risks appearing naive next to the charisma of the monster.
"The devil's most beautiful trick is to persuade us that he does not exist", wrote Charles Baudelaire. Quinlan's aim is to convince us that he is right.
In short, Welles absolves no one, not even the spectator who finds himself admiring the monster. And the last, mocking revelation, which we will not reveal out of respect for those who have not yet seen it, calls every certainty into question.
Sixty-eight years later, the evil that Welles staged has not lost an ounce of its weight.
