I was watching Touch of Evil the other day and had forgotten that it contains one of my favorite lines.
First a little context. Touch of Evil is a film noir that was released in 1958. It stars Orson Welles, who also directed it, as a corrupt cop in a Mexican border town, Charlton Heston (playing a Mexican policeman!), Janet Leigh as his wife, and Marlene Dietrich as some kind of misplaced madam/brothel owner/fortune teller. It’s a dark film involving murder, kidnapping, drug king pins, alcoholism, racism and god knows what else. It’s also renowned for it’s brilliant opening tracking shot which, it seems, every filmmaker since Welles has tried to best. (I think most of those filmmakers forget that Henry Mancini’s score does as much work as the camera in that tour de force scene.) (Scorsese did not forget about the music accompaniment in Goodfellas.)
Now for a little context about Welles and this film.
In 1941, Welles made a little film called Citizen Kane. He was young and dashing, with cherub like cheeks. It is said that he had prodigious appetites of all kinds in his youth.
From 1949 to 1951, Welles was making Othello, and despite wearing makeup to make him look Moorish, he pretty much looks the same, a little older, a little huskier.
Seven years pass before Welles surfaces again* in Touch of Evil. And he is unrecognizable; well on his way to becoming the double-wide, jowly Welles we saw on TV throughout the 1970s, turning up on talk shows performing cheap magic tricks and doing commercials hawking cheap wine and other things.
Okay, so now the line:
“You should lay off those candy bars.” The scene is sad and funny. This was meta before meta was a thing.
So this got me thinking, do I have favorite lines in A Life’s Work? You bet I do, and I will share them in the next post. But first, what are some of your favorite lines in cinematic history?
*Welles made Mr. Arkadin in 1955 but the film wasn’t released until 1962.
Bill
Always like this one in “The Third Man” :
“ …in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock…”
David Licata
Oh yeah, another one of my faves. And I love how Welles finishes the line and giddily says “Bye, old chap” or whatever it is he says, and exits the ferris wheel car.