This is a detective story set in a fictional pair of towns straddling the US-Mexican border. The car of a rich man is blown up. By chance, Mexican federale Vargas (Charlton Heston) is honeymooning in the town, and somehow ends up on the case in parallel with Quinlan (Orson Welles), the rotund, cigar-chomping local cop.
Quinlan works by hunches and intuition, while Vargas works by strict legal procedure. The problem is, Quinlan’s confidence in his hunches makes him willing to plant evidence, in order to work the system which is bogged down with rules of evidence. In this case, Quinlan’s plant is discovered by Vargas, and it makes them into opponents, each desirous of bringing the other down. So the crime itself takes a back seat to this rivalry.
In parallel, there is a gang on the Mexican side, which, for reasons unrelated to the main case, tries to intimidate Vargas to leave town by harassing (and more) his wife. This subplot provides opportunities for red herrings to serve as a foil for character development of Vargas and Quinlan, and also to add greatly to the seedy overall tone of the story.
The “touch of evil” is, apparently, the willingness of Quinlan to take the law into his own hands. The figure is played cartoonishly by Welles — fat, bulgy-eyed, cigar-chomping, muttering. Obviously, Welles had a lot of fun with the character. But unfortunately, his creation of a fleshly cartoon figure is unfair to the analysis of the characters. Had suave, crisp-talking Humphrey Bogart played the part and done all the same things, I suspect the character would have seemed quite sympathetic to us. In short, Welles’ character is as superficial as putting white hats on the good guys and black hats on the bad guys.
I think it is supposed to be ambiguous in many themes, in order to be a rich study of life. We are supposed to be repelled at Quinlan’s anti-Mexican attitude, yet also shocked at the behavior of the Mexicans. Shocked at the crimes, yet repelled by the method of solving them. We are supposed to see that only one kind of law and order — Quinlan’s kind — is really successful, yet it leads to self-destruction and the creation of something like the thing it is purportedly set up against. It is triumphal nihilism; but dished up by one so corrupt in body and soul as Orson Welles, it is its own scare-crow.
Orson Welles had the genius of a bright, creative junior high boy: a keen sense of the macabre, the grotesque, the ludicrous. He had the (subjective) confidence and the (objective) lavish funding to put wings to that vision; until the funds ran dry.
