Orson Welles plays a beleaguered police captain; Marlene Dietrich is a fortune teller; Janet Leigh is an out-of-her-depth honeymooner; Zsa Zsa Gabor is a strip club owner; and Charlton Heston plays… a Mexican prosecutor. So, yeah, Touch of Evil is one of the most outlandish noir films around, and not without its unsavory aspects. It’s also one of the most thrillingly stylized films in the whole genre, as well as in Welles’ monumental but unstable filmography. Its sheer technical audacity even won over Pauline Kael, who praised Welles’ “marvelously garish thriller” as an expression of his abiding “love of the film medium.”

Touch of Evil reaches an early high-water mark with an incredibly intricate, unbearably suspenseful one-take opening sequence, setting off this convoluted story about a double-murder investigation with unparalleled panache. Like most of Welles’ masterpieces, Touch of Evil was torpedoed by studio meddling and underwent a decades-long process of reinstating the director’s original ambitions (thanks to the heroic efforts of legendary editor Walter Murch). Soon after his film was taken out of his hands and recut, with Welles literally locked out of the editing room, he travelled to Mexico City to begin shooting his next misadventure, Don Quixote, which didn’t exactly go swimmingly either…