ICE-Vision: Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
Thursday, January 19 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.
“Made in 1958, it was Orson Welles’s last Hollywood film, and in it he makes transcendent use of the American technology his genius throve on; never again would his resources be so rich or his imagination so fiendishly baroque. Welles stars as the sheriff of a corrupt border town who finds his nemesis in visiting Mexican narcotics agent Charlton Heston; the witnesses to this weirdly gargantuan struggle include Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Akim Tamiroff, and Joseph Calleia, who holds the film’s moral center with sublime uncertainty.” -Dave Kehr (Chicago Reader)
“Touch of Evil, the project with which – some 16 years after Citizen Kane – the 42-year-old Orson Welles tried (and failed) to stage a Hollywood comeback, is a movie of transcendent movie-ness and still-astonishing virtuosity . . . Touch of Evil effectively rung down the curtain on one of the most fertile movements in American popular culture.” -J. Hoberman (Village Voice)