The first time I saw an Orson Welles film, I was impressed by the long shot in the opening. The murderer hiding in the secret place, the hustle and bustle of the border town between the two countries, the explosive hidden behind the car, it seems that the protagonist is always too close to the explosive... The appetite fell to the sky side by side with the sun. Police and bandits, murder, kidnapping, drugs, borders, and torture of beauties, it can be said that as a film noir, it has all the elements of thriller and curiosity, and the rest is left to the good and evil in the moral gray area. The tracking truth at the end echoes it perfectly, and the crisis that exists inadvertently is the most terrifying. The film begins with a righteous statement, saying that the film had been edited privately by the filmmaker, and Wells wrote a 58-page long letter, and finally edited it into the current version as much as possible according to the director's wishes.
The most striking thing about the film is not the tortuous belief in solving the case, but the doubts about the means of law enforcement and fair judgment in the process of solving the case. A policeman who judged the case by intuition did not hesitate to forge evidence to frame the defendant in order to verify the conjecture. Although the case at the end of the film confirmed that the policeman's intuition was correct, and he relied on intuition in the process of handling the case, colluded with drug dealers, murdered and framed the blame. The actions of eradicating dissidents, fabricating evidence, extorting confessions from defendants by torture, etc. are all beyond the professional quality and moral integrity of law enforcement officers. They are not so much to implement justice as to satisfy their fantasy of being the embodiment of justice. The American policeman played by Orson has done the work of an angel even though he is the incarnation of the devil. After 30 years of commanding the police, he was shot in the stinky river by his best comrade, leaving a disgraceful life full of riddles. turn around.
In terms of composition, the film uses the distance of the characters to create a visual comparison of the size of the figure to show the power contrast, often occupying more of the picture, and the front of the picture has more initiative and control ability: the American police stand in the most conspicuous when they appear. The position is always taller than others, especially in the picture of a few people in the same frame, only the Mexican police who follow the principles can stand against it. However, when the American policeman was suspected for the first time, he ran away in anger and was stopped in the lobby. At this time, the American policeman was at the farthest end of the screen. Standing in the middle of the picture, he was in a dilemma, and the policeman who chose to investigate him stood in the position closest to the audience, looking extremely tall. The three people are connected to form a perfect diagonal line, which not only shows the self-absorbed will of the American police, but also highlights the director's evaluation of this arrogant policeman. The future has been predicted in this shot.
Interestingly, the heroine who suffered repeated misfortunes in the film, the wife of the Mexican anti-narcotics police, was tricked into her home by the local drug lord and tried to intimidate. The two seemed to stage a scene-stealing scene in front of the camera: The heroine poses to scare her when she is still in the fog , The drug lord was stunned when he was scolded, but he only showed half of his head under the camera, which is to highlight the competition between good and evil with the details of stealing the spotlight.
What is even more disturbing is that the audience can see the stalker and the stalker, the voyeur and the voyeur in the same frame, and even the suspected drug lord and the policeman, who are only the former. Knowing the existence of the latter, the audience can watch the evil happen without the knowledge of one party.
Numerous looking up shots not only make the characters tall, but also magnify the thoughts of each character to the audience: the arrogance of the American police, the fear of the heroine facing danger, etc. The most classic is the close-up of the American police officer when he is about to be lured out by his colleagues: a huge bison head occupies the entire background behind him, and he is wild but also dying.
The contrast between light and shadow in black and white movies is always the most obvious. When the American police killed the drug lord privately, the light in the room was bright and dim, and the good and evil lost their obvious boundaries here, leaving only the ambiguous desire to kill and fear. When the heroine was stared at by the drug lord's men, she was also shaking her with a flashlight in the dark, and the only light became the source of danger. When the heroine is caught in a motel, her face gradually changes from light to being shrouded in the shadow of a person, and the horror of the slowdown deepens the level of the crisis.
Whether to insist on justice and let the suspect go, or frame the real murderer into the net in the name of justice, this is a dead question. After all, people are not gods, and they will commit countless mistakes; and the law enforcers do not have the power to judge, and should not change the fate of many people with their own selfish desires. Two police officers with very different personalities from two countries collide in this border town, and the spark burns more than morality. As for the fact that the heroine was not injected with real drugs in the motel, I can only say that it is too early and too light.
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