Text | magasa
When the mammoth-like body of Hank Quinlan was shot crashed into a small ditch on the U.S.-Mexico border, Orson Wells' blockbuster career was essentially over at that moment.
After Macbeth, Wells enjoyed a decade of exile as a king in Europe, getting the chance to appear in Universal's film based on the popular novel The Order of Evil. Along with him in the film was Charlton Hesston, who starred in the "Ten Commandments," which had already become a hit.
Heston initially mistakenly believed that Wells was directing the new film, and happily accepted the contract, but this was not the case, so he suggested to Universal that Wells direct it. People close to Wells in the world's top management adopted the proposal. Thus, "Citizen Wells", who had been on the blacklist of directors of major studios, returned.
But the collaboration was suspicious from the start. Universal sent eyeliner to stalk on the set, afraid that he would overrun, Wells knew it, but he made some tricks and secretly tried many novel shooting methods.
The 3 minutes and 20 seconds long shot at the beginning of the film has now become one of the most famous shots in the history of the film, the audience sees a pair of hands secretly putting a time bomb into the trunk of a car, and then the car starts, at this time we see a pair of whispering men and women into the painting, the camera cleverly moves between the lover and the car, the audience's attention does not know where to fall for a while, and finally comes to the border between the United States and Mexico, the car passes and leaves, and the remaining pair of men and women begin to kiss - But the focus of our concerns involuntarily shifts beyond the painting.
What happens to the car that drove away, with the bomb hidden? At this time, a banging explosion came from outside the painting...
Objectively speaking, the script originally called "The Order of Evil" is just a third-rate police story, but for a few directors, any material that comes into his hands will automatically brand him, even if you erase his name from the beginning, it will be recognized at a glance. Wells happened to be one of those directors.
The film, renamed Contact of Evil, shows wells' natural development of the Baroque cinematic style since Citizen Kane, Amberson, Othello, and Mr. Arcadin. It absorbed, more appropriately, revived the postwar tradition of film noir— a genre that was nearly moribund at the time, and it needed a film like "Evil Contact" to draw a powerful end to it.
In some respects, "Evil Contact" is too much of anachronistic by the standards of a blockbuster B-movie (a true B-movie that was later released in the second episode of a double-film series).
Wells employs a very trivial approach to storytelling, jumping back and forth between several simultaneous scenes, deliberately giving the plot a very fragmented approach that the viewer has to follow in mind gymnastics. In exaggerated wide-angle shots, his massive body occupies almost half the screen. A large number of real-world night scenes, as well as confusing music, make the film shrouded in a very depressing atmosphere for a long time.
It's also a political film — most of Wells's works are more or less political in nature. Police corruption, racial discrimination, and the relationship between law and morality are all on full display, but like Wells's other works, the villain is always the character who digs the deepest and most completely, so the political melodrama always evolves into a Shakespearean personal character tragedy in the end.
In this sense, Quinlan is the same as Kane, Akadin, and Lem, all of whom were great men destroyed by the mighty EGO. This also coincides with the trajectory of Wells' film career.
After completing the post-production of the film, Wells went to Brazil to complete the never-ending "Don Quixote", this time the trip to South America turned out to be exactly the same as the encounter in "Amberson Family", under the control of the studio, his post-production film was re-cut beyond recognition, the opening long shot was superimposed with subtitles and soundtrack, and a third-rate director was also found to make up the explanatory scene, merging and deleting the original two story lines.
Shocked to see the reworked new edition, Wells spent hours in a fit of rage, drafting a 58-page memo denouncing Universal's trampling on the director's power, counting all sorts of low-level incompetence, and pointing out how to edit the right ones.
But Wells could change nothing, and the new edition was finally hastily released, unsurprisingly a total failure in the U.S. market, but it was hailed in Europe, Truffaut wrote in film reviews, and even though Wells did not have editing rights, he was a well-deserved poet, and his works were beautiful poems. Some people do everything from script to shooting to post-production, and that doesn't change that he's just a mediocre craftsman.
In 1998, with the joint efforts of some industry insiders and film historians, a new version of "Evil Contact" remade according to the Wells Memorandum was released, although it is still not reproduced as it is, but it is the version closest to the director's original intention.
The film's impact on later generations is immeasurable, and Hitchcock's Horror not only confronts Wells in the opening long shot (but is technically limited by the use of superimposed), his use of Janet Lee is clearly influenced by Wells, who once again becomes an object of desire, in a desolate motel, waiting for the abuse of the opposite sex. In addition, the long, intricately scheduled shot in Robert Altman's Big Player is also a public tribute to Wells.