As you may be aware, this isn’t the same version of the shot that played in theaters back in 1958. Touch Of Evil was taken away from Welles by Universal and more or less butchered; the DVD that’s now available features a painstaking reconstruction derived from a 58-page memo Welles wrote to the studio after seeing their cut, detailing changes he hoped they would make. Originally, the film’s opening credits played over the shot, accompanied by Henry Mancini’s Latin-inflected score. Am I a bad cinephile if I confess that I kinda miss that version? (I’d point you to it, but it doesn’t seem to be available anywhere online, surprisingly.) Welles’ musical concept, in which we hear various competing juke-joint bands being piped onto the street via loudspeakers as the car passes by, is far more ambitious, and works fine, but it doesn’t immediately establish a tone the way Mancini’s jolly-menacing Perez Prada homage did. And the credits were never a distraction for me—if anything, they added to the sense of playfulness. Maybe it’s just that I saw the shot that way first, but it’s the sole “restored” element that I don’t wholeheartedly prefer.
You do still hear a tiny bit of Mancini’s score right at the beginning, as the anonymous figure sets the timer on the bomb to three minutes. Welles has the actor turn slightly toward the camera as the shot fades in, just to make sure our eyes are drawn immediately to what he’s doing, and also has him hold still for a few seconds after turning the dial, so that we’re sure to register precisely how much time will elapse before the big boom. (It’s actually three minutes and 14 seconds away, but that’s still amazing choreography.) He then provides one of the movies’ all-time great shadows as he runs to place the bomb in the trunk, passing so close to the off-camera light source that he seems to be moving twice as fast as he really is. The doomed couple gets in and drives off, and Welles follows their slow progress to the border crossing over a stretch of several traffic-choked blocks, picking up stars Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh along the way. The Steadicam hadn’t yet been invented, as is evident from the hand-held shakiness at the outset—but the crane certainly had, as is equally evident when we suddenly lift skyward for a God’s-eye view.
What prevents the shot from feeling remotely stunt-y is Welles’ superlative use of both space and time. Our knowledge of the impending explosion makes us hyper-aware of the car’s location, especially in relation to Heston and Leigh (even though we don’t yet know anything about their characters), and Welles expertly teases this instinctive anxiety by allowing it to occasionally leave the frame, getting a few feet ahead of our heroes before being stopped by traffic or passing goats. (Among other things, the shot casually establishes a vivid landscape of border-town seediness, with the street somehow looking simultaneously crowded and near-abandoned.) Meanwhile, we wonder how much time has now elapsed. Has it been two minutes? At least two, for sure. Maybe two and a half. Without that tick-tick-tick (of which we’re reminded, in the unlikely event that we’ve somehow forgotten, by the blonde victim-to-be, in what’s always struck me as a bit of a callous joke), the absence of cuts would serve no real purpose. Welles lays it all out in a single unbroken shot because doing so creates maximum tension—not via whipped-up urgency, but due to our consciousness that the sequence has a built-in “expiration date.”
And even that expectation gets undermined, to some degree. If this shot had been conceived for the first time today, using contemporary technology, I feel confident that it would include the explosion, most likely in harrowing apparent proximity to the stars. Directors love that sort of thing—Tom Cruise just missed having a vehicle land on his head only a few months ago in the latest Mission: Impossible. And maybe Welles would have liked to do something similar here, and just plain couldn’t in 1958. But I don’t think so. He was plenty ingenious enough to work out a way to replace the actors in the car with dummies and have it blow up in the background as Heston and Leigh kiss in the foreground, if that was what he’d wanted. That it instead explodes off-camera, at an instant when we don’t expect it, seems very much in keeping with his general sensibility, almost serving as a rebuke to the idea that he’s laboring to impress. Even his most stunning effects, like Charles Foster Kane seeming to step into a still photograph of the Chronicle’s staff (revealing that he’s poached them for his own paper), or the same film’s breakfast-table whip-pans, always seek to explore the medium’s relationship with the passage of time. That this one has inspired a series of self-conscious homages that call attention to their own duration is exquisitely apropos.
