Digital Video Editing Production Analysis

Digital Video Editing

Production Analysis of Film Trailer for “A Touch of Evil — the Strangest Vengeance Ever Planned!”

According to Gary Arnold (1998), “A Touch of Evil” is “a lurid but stylish crime thriller cherished by numerous movie freaks as Orson Welles’ trashiest masterpiece” (p. 3). The movie was ultimately directed by Orson Welles after some negotiations with the studio, with screenplay also by Welles. Jeff Shannon reports that this movie is widely regarded to be “the greatest B. movie ever made, the original-release version of Orson Welles’s film noir masterpiece Touch of Evil was, ironically, never intended as a B. movie at all — it merely suffered that fate after it was taken away from writer-director Welles, then reedited and released in 1958 as the second half of a double feature” (p. 2). “A Touch of Evil” was Orson Welles’ fifth Hollywood production, but it was his last American film. According to Tim Dirks, “A Touch of Evil” was the last great film noir during the so-called “classic” era of noirs from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. The movie was made in 1958, before the introduction of the rating system; however, the movie is characterized by adult subject matter, with numerous episodes of graphic violence and allusions to drug abuse and sexual depravity. The movie was based on the novel “Badge of Evil” by Whit Masterston as well as an uncredited screenplay by Paul Monash. The editors herein were provided with thirteen minutes of film which was edited from the Orson Welles’ masterpiece, “A Touch of Evil.” Using these 13 minutes of film, the editors produced a one-and-a-half minute trailer using Adobe Premier Professional. The process is described further below, followed by a summary of the project in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Background and Overview. Neither of the editors had any previous knowledge of how to use Adobe Premier Professional, although both were expert with Windows XP. In addition, the only knowledge of editing that was brought to the editing room was what the editors have read from lecture notes and books on previous sessions via the Internet. The editors attended three sessions at the university; the first session was comprised of a viewing of the film, “A Touch of Evil.” On the morning of the second session, the researchers watched a critical review of the film which lasted about 15 minutes. Following this presentation, the editors were separated into groups and given instructions on what was required, provided with the 13 minutes of edited film and were instructed on how to use the Adobe Premier Professional software. The remainder of the day and half of the following day were spent producing the trailer. The editors attempted to create a trailer that incorporated all the salient elements of a good trailer.

A brief summary of the movie is provided below, followed by a discussion of how the trailer was developed and the supporting rationale behind the choices made.

Touch of Evil.”

In this black-and-white motion picture from 1958, Mexico’s chief narcotics officer, Mike Vargas, finds himself in a border town on a quick honeymoon with his U.S. wife. Vargas is compelled to testify against Grande, a drug lord whose brother and sons are tracking him in an effort to intimidate him so he will change his mind about. When a car bomb kills a rich U.S. developer, Vargas embroils himself in the investigation, putting his wife in harm’s way. “After Vargas catches local legendary U.S. cop, Hank Quinlan, planting evidence against a Mexican national suspected in the bombing, Quinlan joins forces with the Grande family to impugn Vargas’s character. Local political lackeys, a hard-edged whore, pachucos, and a nervous motel clerk also figure in the plot” (Plot Summary for Touch of Evil, 2005 p. 2). The picture is in the film noir genre, wherein “sudden upwellings of violence in a culture whose fabric seems to be unraveling” can be observed with nothing available to repair the design. Such is the fictional world projected in films noirs such as Orson Welles ‘ a Touch of Evil (1958)” (Merrill, 1993 p. 241).

In fact, Alfred Hitchcock reportedly reworked the “quirky” motel clerk character in this one for Psycho (1960); the role of the Mirador Motel night manager was written specifically for Dennis Weaver, because Welles admired his work on “Gunsmoke” (1955) and wanted to work with him professionally (Nowell-Smith, 1997). The music used throughout the movie was from sound sources that pertained to the film: radio transmissions, jukeboxes, player piano. “Around 1960, film music also began to turn towards nonclassical idioms, and it looked for a while as if jazz, both swing and bebop, would make major inroads into the cinema. The 1950s saw jazz appear in a number of movie scores, almost all of them associated in some way with crime narratives (Nowell-Smith, 1997).

The music in “A Touch of Evil” was written by none other than Henry Mancini. According to Nowell-Smith (1997), “The fate of jazz as film music strongly resembles that of classical music: it was taken over by established film composers like Henry Mancini, Lalo Schifrin, Dave Grusin, John Barry, and Michel Legrand, who took elements of its basic language and integrated them into a ‘mod’ style tailored to the flow of the film” (p. 563). The film is set in a fictional Mexican border town, “Los Robles” (described on a billboard at the edge of town as the “Paris of the Border” (Case, 1996); however, it was actually filmed in Venice, California because the place looked “convincingly run-down and decayed” (Plot Summary, 3). The black-and-white medium of the movie tends to add to this quality as well. There is also an ongoing undercurrent of racial and sexual tension throughout the movie that is communicated to the audience through a combination of musical, visual and narrative elements: “The anxiety about borders and the threatening ambivalence they raise along the divisions of sex, race, and gender are conveyed through the narrative and its relation to the sequence of shots” (Case, 1996 p. 221). The movie also develops a sense of foreboding early on with these very elements, a process that was reinforced by the performances of Dennis Weaver and Charlton Heston as they react to the strange events that are unfolding around them. Not all of this is entirely believable, but the story line is sufficiently compelling to overcome these constraints: “The phoniness is well worth putting up with, though. Any movie fan interested in visual storytelling (or the underutilized power of crafty sound work) can sit back and enjoy this, even if some of the nuttier aspects of the story don’t wash” (Tatara, 1998 p. 3).

From a cinematography perspective, Welles makes it clear from the outset that there are two powerful forces involved, but the venue in which these forces come together is highly contrived. “As good Mexicans are played by familiar white actors in shoe polish, such as Charlton Heston, the border is recognizably Venice, California — the pun from Paris to Venice part of the typically ironic, layered references in avant-garde treatments. The repeated shots of the Venice arcade, along with its canals, the town’s trademarks, have multiple functions” (Case, 1996 p. 221). These multiple functions include providing the audience with a “good-cop/bad-cop” cross-border approach to crime solving. “This strategy of location is conjoined with the positive hero, Vargas, played in shoe polish,” Case notes; however, there is an important series of scenes that helps to illustrate how this is accomplished. For example, Oson Welles as Hank Quinlan, is the bad white cop; when he first encounters Miguel “Mike” Vargas (Charlton Heston), the “good Mexican cop,” through the following sequence unfolds: Quinlan, talking to his cohorts at the scene of the crime, says, “I hear you even invited some kind of a Mexican”; there is a cut to Heston, who is entering in front of a billboard that says “Welcome Stranger to Picturesque Los Robles Paris of the West” (Case, 1996 p. 221). In this regard, Case emphasizes that it is important to note that the white actor portraying a Mexican enters the scene immediately following a racist line delivered by the bad guy with the play on the location in Venice in the background. According to Case, “The compound of elements reassures us that racism, national agendas, and the ‘real estate’ of properties are here only devices employed by avant-garde cultural producers to shock us with the seeming radicality of taboos, but save us through the aestheticizing of them” (p. 222). These early exchanges between key characters and the highly prominent signage serve very distinct purposes in this movie. According to Telotte (2000):

Prologue essentially cinematize us, point directly towards the following narrative, establishes certain signposts that will prove useful for evaluating it, and “even suggest we see it within a lineage of popular thought, one that often couches commentary about the most pressing cultural concerns in a fantastic and disarming context, at both a temporal and aesthetic distance from our world (Telotte, 2000 p. 45).

There are also important racial issues that are examined throughout “A Touch of Evil”; these are accomplished through what Nerrico (1992) terms “visual representations of ‘indeterminate’ spaces, both physical and corporeal”; the “bordertown and the half-breed, la frontera y el mestizo: a space and a subject whose identities are not fractured but fracture itself, where hyphens, bridges, border stations, and schizophrenia are the rule rather than the exception” (Nericcio, 1992 p. 54). There are some important musical and visual elements present in the opening scenes of “A Touch of Evil” that help set the stage for what is to follow, and it quickly becomes clear that there are some highly charged oppositional forces involved that are going to create some sticky problems for themselves as well as the audience, but the cinematographic elements helped to make these issues more digestible for the America of the 1950s where segregation was still common and Hispanics had not yet assumed their pronounced demographic presence in the U.S.

At that time, “Any lingering reminders of exclusionary practices became titillating as they played into the complexity of the signification. Screening emphasized its entertainment value in order to make palatable its structuration of social space” (Case, 1996 p. 221). Clearly, then, capturing these essential elements in a motion picture trailer is an important part of any production effort, and these issues are discussed further below.

Motion Picture Trailers. In their essay, “Appropriate for All Viewing Audiences? An Examination of Violent and Sexual Portrayals in Movie Previews Featured on Video Rentals,” Mary Beth Oliver and Sriram Kalyanaraman (2002) report that “The rapidly changing media landscape has contributed to the omnipresent nature of movies. Consumers are now able to view motion pictures in a variety of venues, including in the theatre and on network television, videocassette, pay-per view, and digital videodisc, among others” (p. 283). In response to this increase in diversity of entertainment choices, producers are increasingly seeking out innovative ways of marketing their movies, such as placement of highly visible and colorful promotional materials in non-traditional arenas such as shopping malls, ATMs, and the Internet. “Given that viewers report that movie previews or trailers are one of the most important determinants of motion picture selection,” they say, “it is not surprising that in 1999 an average of approximately $1.6 million per film was spent on movie trailers alone” (Oliver & Kalyanaraman, 2002 p. 284). Taken together, these trends make crafting an effective movie trailer critically important to the successful outcome of virtually any investment in a major motion picture. Indeed, “The objective of nearly every trailer is to get teenage boys’ butts into seats… And that means going for as much violence and sex as you can jam into 2-1/2 minutes” (Streisand, 1999 p. 56). The editors herein had even less time (as noted above, the trailer produced here was 1-1/2 minutes long), but every effort was made to take advantage of every second.

Steps to Trailer Production and Rationale. In spite of the unfamiliarity of the editors with the Adobe Premier Pro-software, the program was sufficiently intuitive that no time was lost in actually beginning work. After familiarizing ourselves with the software mechanics involved, the editors next considered what important elements of the 13-minute segment should be used and for what purpose. Following a series of reviews and note-taking, the editors determined that in order to introduce the stellar cast in “A Touch of Evil” shown in Table 1 below, a series of cameo shots of the respective stars are immediately followed by marquee boards featuring their names.

All of these shots are accompanied by shifts in the musical accompaniment from tinny player piano to the lively jazz of Henry Mancini.

Table 1. “A Touch of Evil” Cast Overview (first billed only)

Charlton Heston Ramon Miguel ‘Mike’ Vargas

Janet Leigh Susan ‘Susie’ Vargas

Orson Welles Police Captain Hank Quinlan

Joseph Calleia Police Sergeant Pete Menzies

Akim Tamiroff ‘Uncle’ Joe Grandi

Joanna Cook Moore Marcia Linnekar (as Joanna Moore)

Ray Collins District Attorney Adair

Dennis Weaver Mirador Motel night manager

Valentin de Vargas Pancho, Grandi hood (as Valentin De Vargas)

Mort Mills Al Schwartz, district attorney’s assistant

Victor Millan Manelo Sanchez

Lalo Rios Risto, Grandi’s nephew throwing acid

Michael Sargent Pretty Boy

Phil Harvey Blaine

Joi Lansing Blonde

Source: Plot Summary for Touch of Evil, 2005.

These sequences are accompanied by a tinny old-time player piano track that helps set the tone for what is to follow. The opening scene of the black-and-white trailer shows an explosion and brief chase sequence, followed by a gruff, cigar-chewing Orson Welles emerging from the driver’s seat of a police car. The jazz-bongo drum combination that typified the 1950s beat generation is countered by the tinny player piano to help delineate the transitions between characters and scenes. These various ambient noises help to provide the scenes with additional dimension, as well as serving to define moments of transition between scenes and credit titles for the respective characters.

A sense of dread and foreboding is further established by the sinister appearances of rapists and other ne’er-do-wells, and the shot of the tarot cards being spread on the table helps to create a sense of intrigue and mystery about what is taking place. According to Peter Van Ness (1996), “Tarot cards are used to play an occult parlor game in which one person deals a hand to another and then reads the cards in the sense of interpreting them as augurs of health, romance, and success” (p. 532). While they are fairly well-known today with little sinister connotations associated with them, tarot cards were still closely linked with gypsy fortune-tellers and the occult in the 1950s (Van Ness, 1996). Why does Charton Heston need his fortune read, anyway? The scenes that follow help to explain that Heston is in for some unexpected twists as he maneuvers his way through the racism, the underworld and the seamier side of life on the U.S./Mexican border.

Conclusion

The research showed that “A Touch of Evil” (1958) was directed by Orson Welles, written by Welles and Paul Monash, and was based on a novel by Whit Masterson. There is much more than a “touch” of evil in this movie, though, and it manifests itself in a wide range of ways. To help capture this essence in a one-and-a-half minute trailer was challenging, but the editors found the Adobe Premier Pro-software to be a robust and intuitive program that allowed them to become productive in a fairly short order. The editors also determined that although a motion picture trailer is an incredibly important component of the production and marketing of virtually any movie today, there is also much more involved in the process than was originally envisioned. Identifying those important components of a 13-minute segment of a movie that would help communicate its essential elements to the audience without revealing too much about the plot was deemed a challenging enterprise indeed. Applying these same techniques to a feature-length production would represent an enormous endeavor, and the editors will watch such trailers in the future with a more critical – and appreciative – eye.

Bibliography

Arnold, Gary. 1998. ‘Re-Edit’ Inserts Welles’ Final Touches in Thriller. The Washington Times, September 20, 3.

Case, Sue-Ellen. 1996. The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture. Bloomington, in: Indiana University Press.

Dirks, Tim. 2005. Greatest Films: “A Touch of Evil.” [Online]. Available: http://www.filmsite.org/touc.html.

Merrill, Robert. 1993. Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance and the Detective Traditions. Critique, 34(4):241.

Nericcio, William Anthony. “Of Mestizos and Half-Breeds: Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.” In Chicanos and Film. 1992. Chan a. Noriega (Ed.). New York: Garland Publishing.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 1997. The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Plot Summary for Touch of Evil. 2005. Internet Movie Database. [Online]. Available: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052311/plotsummary.

Shannon, Jeff. 2005. “A Touch of Evil” Reviews. [Online]. Available: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00004W46J/002-1?.

Streisand, B. 1999. Lawyers, guns, money. U.S. News & World Report, (June 14) 56-57.

Tatara, Paul. 1998. “Review: Welles’ genius reconstructed in ‘Touch of Evil.’” CNN-Review. [Online]. Available: http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9809/23/review.touchofevil/.

Telotte, J.P. 2000. The Problem of the Real and THX 1138. Film Criticism, 24(3): 45.

Van Ness, Peter H. 1996. Spirituality and the Secular Quest. New York: Crossroad Publishing.

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