With the passage of time, one season’s flop can become another season’s classic, and that’s certainly been the case with 1958’s Touch of Evil, Orson Welles’ visually inventive and absorbing exercise in film noir. Universal Pictures didn’t know what to make of the movie when it was completed, and they released it on the second half of a double bill with no press screenings despite a star-studded cast that included Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich. Fifty years later, Touch of Evil is a cult favorite widely regarded as one of Welles’ finest American features, and Universal has given the film a glossy DVD re-release in honor of the picture’s fiftieth birthday. However proud Universal may be of Touch of Evil in 2008, the new DVD edition offers a telling portrait of the troubles Wells had bringing his story to the screen as he saw fit in 1958.

Today there’s no arguing that Orson Welles is one of the real visionaries of American cinema, but that was hardly the consensus in 1957, at least in Hollywood. Earning the wrath of William Randolph Hearst with Citizen Kane had proven to be a very bad career move for Welles, no matter how great the movie had been, and he had butted heads with a number of studio heads since his first and greatest feature was released in 1941. Welles hadn’t directed a feature in Hollywood since the critical and commercial disappointment of 1947’s The Lady From Shanghai, and he was taking work as an actor where he could get it when Albert Zugsmith, a producer at Universal Pictures, cast Welles as a corrupt cattle rancher in the 1957 western Man In The Shadow. Welles and Zugsmith hit it off, the producer offered him a part in his next project, and Welles signed on to play an unscrupulous police detective in a crime-ridden border town in a thriller based on Whit Masterson’s pulp novel Badge of Evil. Zugsmith was trying to persuade Charlton Heston, then riding high on the success of The Ten Commandments, to play the lead, and while different versions of the story exist, all come to the same conclusion – Heston told Zugsmith he’d be happy to appear in the film if Welles was directing. Zugsmith promptly offered Welles the assignment, Universal agreed if it meant Heston would star in the movie, and in 1957 Welles began work on what would be his last directorial project for a major American studio, Touch of Evil.

This being an Orson Welles project, things went smoothly for only so long, and while Zugsmith was supportive and offered the director no interference (the film was completed on schedule and on budget), Universal’s top brass were not entirely pleased with the footage coming back from the locations in Venice, California. When Zugsmith took a post with M-G-M during post-production and Welles went to Mexico to raise financing for his screen adaptation of Don Quixote, Universal executives stepped in, had editors Virgil Vogel and Aaron Stell recut the picture, and brought in director Harry Keller to shoot additional footage (Heston and Leigh were contractually obligated to participate in the reshoots, but did so under protest). When Welles saw Universal’s first cut of Touch of Evil, he was furious, and that evening he sat down at his typewriter and rattled off a fifty-eight page memo, requesting a number of editorial changes he felt needed to be made and explaining why they were necessary. For the most part, Universal ignored Welles’ notes and a 96-minute version of Touch of Evil received a lackadaisical American release in the Spring of 1958. Predictably, the film did better in Europe, where the young critics of the French New Wave hailed Welles as a genius.

In 1975, a professor teaching a film class requested a print of Touch of Evil from Universal to screen for his students, and during the showing he made a startling discovery – the version he received was 109 minutes long, and for years many film scholars assumed this longer cut was Welles’ original version of the movie, and it released to repertory theaters in 1976 and later appeared on VHS. It wasn’t until researchers discovered Welles’ editing memo years later that it became obvious the 109-minute version was an early “preview” cut that more closely resembled Universal’s original edit than what Welles intended, though it did include several key scenes missing from the original release print. In 1997 Rick Schmidlin, a producer who had been working with Universal on restoration projects, sold the studio on the notion of creating a new edit of Touch of Evil based on Welles’ notes. Walter Murch, the celebrated editor and sound designer who had worked with Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Anthony Minghella, came on board as editor and Jonathan Rosenbaum, a noted Welles authority and author of the book Discovering Orson Welles, became a consultant on the project. The 1998 restored edit of Touch of Evil, running 111 minutes, enjoyed a successful run of revival houses and film festivals and became the version released by Universal on DVD in 2000.

Given the convoluted history of Touch Of Evil, Universal has either offered fans the definitive look at the film with their new DVD release or gone into total overkill– the “50th Anniversary Edition” features all three versions of the movie in their entirety, each kitted out with a commentary track (the 1998 restored version has two), and two short documentaries, one focusing on the making of the film and the other concerning the restoration and re-editing of the film in 1998. Schmidlin, to his credit, states both in the Evil Lost and Found short and his commentary on the 1998 edit that the most recent version is not a “Director’s Cut,” since Welles had been dead for twelve years when the project got under way and the director will never see it. But even though it’s a remarkably well-educated guess as to what Welles had in mind, it also begs the question of which of these is the definitive version of Touch of Evil – or even if such a thing exists.

In terms of coherent narrative flow and skill in establishing the characters, the 1998 “Restored Version” is the clear winner, closing a few holes in the story, tightening the cross cutting between the story threads and adding some needed gravitas to Joseph Calleia’s performance as Menzies. (It also looks better on disc than the other two versions, though thankfully all three have been given excellent digital transfers for this set.) For pacing, the original theatrical cut moves with admirable speed and enthusiasm, and if it leaves a few plot points in the lurch, most of them are hard to spot unless you’re looking carefully, and Heston’s sometimes stiff performance benefits from the energetic flow. And while the “Preview” version found in 1975 feels like a failed compromise between the other two cuts in this context, it boasts the most informative commentary track included here, as Rosenbaum and James Naremore talk about Touch Of Evil’s place in Welles’ oeuvre, the film’s perspectives on race and class, and the technical and creative differences between the various editions of the movie. (The theatrical cut gets a lively and entertaining commentary from writer F.X Feeney, and the 1998 Restoration features a rambling solo commentary from Schmidlin as well as another in which he moderates a chat between Heston and Leigh, who both sound enthusiastic but also show their age, having trouble remembering certain salient points.) And the most intriguing bonus with this set doesn’t even appear on the discs – it’s a reprint of Welles fifty-eight page memo, allowing fans to read for themselves just what the great man had to say about the studio’s attempts to reshape his work.

In his commentary, Rosenbaum makes the point that while Touch of Evil was one of many films Welles made that was tampered with by the studio, it’s the one that seems to suffer the least from the creative interference, and watching the three versions of the picture back to back bears this out. For all the minor differences between the three differing cuts of the film, they share the same strengths – a rich, bold visual style (Russell Metty’s cinematography is superb), an intelligent and ambitious use of the moving camera, a subtle but insistent air of dread that hovers over the proceedings, a determined pace that keeps the story moving forward, and a handful of remarkable performances, especially from Akim Tamiroff, Dennis Weaver, Calleia, Dietrich and Wells himself. Universal clearly didn’t know what they had with Touch of Evil in 1958, but regardless of what they did with the film they couldn’t strip it of its power, and five decades later it remains a fascinating wild card in Welles’ body of work, an effective thriller that reveals new layers each time you look at it. And Universal’s 50th Anniversary Edition gives you plenty of chances to peel any number of those layers at your leisure.