Overview

Orson Welles' classic 1958 noir movie Touch of Evil, the story of a corrupt police chief in a small town on the Mexican-American border, starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, is widely recognised as one of the greatest noir films of Classical Hollywood cinema. Richard Deming's study of the film considers it as an outstanding example of the noir genre and explores its complex relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson. He traces the film's production history, and provides an insightful close analysis of its key scenes, including its famous opening sequence, a single take in which the camera follows a booby-trapped car on its journey through city streets and across the border.

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9781844579495

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Engaging... It combines a blow-by-blow account of the thriller's troubled production with a thoughtful rebuttal to Paul Schrader's description of it as film noir's epitaph , while Orson Welles' shadow inevitably looms large. * Total Film * [The] BFI Film Classics... make a welcome return with Richard Deming's excellent study of A Touch of Evil. Orson Welles's 1958 noir is justly celebrated by film aficionados, though its meandering plot has puzzled many viewers. Deming's book is a fine guide for the perplexed * The Best American Poetry blog *

Engaging… It combines a blow-by-blow account of the thriller’s troubled production with a thoughtful rebuttal to Paul Schrader’s description of it as “film noir’s epitaph”, while Orson Welles’ shadow inevitably looms large. * Total Film * “[The] BFI Film Classics… make a welcome return with Richard Deming’s excellent study of A Touch of Evil. Orson Welles’s 1958 noir is justly celebrated by film aficionados, though its meandering plot has puzzled many viewers. Deming's book is a fine guide for the perplexed * The Best American Poetry blog * In this contribution to the BFI Film Classics series, Richard Deming explores what makes Touch of Evil so intricate and so knowing as a parable of idealism dying many deaths… Deming ably conveys just how visceral the film is. * Times Literary Supplement *

Engaging... It combines a blow-by-blow account of the thriller's troubled production with a thoughtful rebuttal to Paul Schrader's description of it as film noir's epitaph , while Orson Welles' shadow inevitably looms large. * Total Film *

Author Information

Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence (2008), received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems, Day for Night,appeared in 2016. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading(2008), and Art of the Ordinary: the Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Literature, and Philosophy (2018). He contributes to such magazines as Artforum, Sight & Sound, and The Boston Review. His poems have appeared in such places as Iowa Review, Field, American Letters & Commentary, and The Nation. He teaches at Yale University, USA where he is the Director of Creative Writing. Winner of the Berlin Prize, he was the Spring 2012 John P. Birkelund Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.

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