INSTRUCTOR: Touch of Evil, a 1958 film noir set on the US-Mexican border and directed by Orson Welles, is not a typical Hollywood film of the era. Take its opening shot, which lasts for an unprecedented 3 and 1/2 minutes. The elaborately choreographed long take introduces Mexican prosecutor Miguel Vargas, played in brown face by Charlton Heston, and his American wife, played by Janet Lee. It also introduces the crime that is the catalyst for the plot-- a bomb planted in the car of an American millionaire.

As French critic and filmmaker Francois Truffaut wrote in his review of the film, quote, "you could remove Orson Welles's name from the credits, and it wouldn't make any difference. Because from the first shot, including the credits themselves, it is obvious that Citizen Kane is behind the camera, end quote.

Truffaut refers to Wells as Citizen Kane the protagonist of the director's debut film of the same name, a larger-than-life American newsman and would-be politician. Truffaut and the other filmmakers and critics associated with the French New Wave propagated the auteur theory, which argues that a director marks his films with his artistic sensibility.

For these critics, Orson Welles was the auteur. Citizen Kane was made when the director was only 25 years old and is widely considered to be the greatest film of all time. But Welles had no future in the rigid Hollywood system. And by 1958, when Universal was adapting the novel Badge of Evil, they were only persuaded to take him on as director if he would play the role of Hank Quinlan, the corrupt cop who's Vargas's antagonist in the film.

The character becomes something of an allegory for Wells's own position. Are his excessive methods unconscionable, like Quinlan's? Or is his stylistic excess justified?

MAN: Well, here comes Hank at last. I guess you've heard of Hank Quinlan, our local police celebrity.

MAN: I'd like to meet him.

MAN: That's what you think.

INSTRUCTOR: Cinematographer Russell Metty uses distorting, wide-angle lenses and a low camera position to make Wells look even more corpulent. There is no clear hierarchy of US over Mexico in the film, despite the fact that the film makes no attempt to depict a real Mexico. It uses ethnic masks to critique masks of virtue and righteousness.

MAN: What's my fortune?

INSTRUCTOR: In this fantasy Mexico, a fortuneteller, played by Marlene Dietrich, best known as a German sex symbol in the 1930s and '40s, tells him the truth.

WOMAN: You haven't got any.

MAN: What do you mean?

WOMAN: Your future is all used up.

INSTRUCTOR: On one level, the film's ending is conventional. The bad guy gets what's coming to him. The heterosexual couple finally gets to complete the kiss that was interrupted by the bomb that started the film.

MAN: It's all over, Susie. I'm taking you home. Home.

INSTRUCTOR: But on another lever, the film leaves mere plot behind to implicate the great director's career in the corruption and hypocrisy of the Hollywood studio system.

MAN: His famous intuition was right after all. He framed that Mexican kid, Sanchez, but he didn't even need to. The kid confessed about that bomb. So it turns out Quinlan was right after all.

WOMAN: Isn't somebody going to come and take him away?

INSTRUCTOR: As Quinlan floats like trash, waiting to be taken away, American righteousness is questioned along with the power of the auteur to determine our reception of film.

WOMAN: A lousy cop.

MAN: Is that all you have to say for him?

WOMAN: What does it matter what you say about people?

INSTRUCTOR: Touch of Evil can be seen as a farewell to the innocence of Hollywood studio production.