The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Touch of Evil
271
police being authorized to abuse their power?” From the finished film,
do you think he ever reconciles that?
Oz: Boy, that’s a dilemma, isn’t it? I wish I was smart enough to answer
that. I don’t think there’s a yes or no. A complex question needs a complex
answer, and there are shades of gray. I don’t know.
Orson was emphatic. He said better that they go unpunished, because—
Oz: No, I’m sure, I’m sure that Orson said that. There’s no question in
my mind.
Heston would argue that the crux of the story hangs on the line that comes
from Vargas’s mouth, “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”
Oz: It’s interesting. He said to me and Jim Henson that he hated the word professional.
He didn’t like being called a professional because he thought professional
seemed like a soldier’s title, and so he was very much against that police
state and the soldier. But it’s interesting. That five-minute scene that just blows
me away, I think—wasn’t there a story there?—the studio was on to him saying,
“You’re gonna be late, you’re gonna be late, you gotta cut.”
It happened a couple of times. He would do a great, five-minute-long
scene and then say, “Okay, wrap and print the last three cuts. We’re
ahead of schedule by two days.”
Oz: There’s the first five-minute scene, then you go away for several scenes,
then you come back to the same room—that room must have inspired him.
Let’s talk about the Henry Mancini score a little bit.
Oz: It was very interesting. Right now it’s very dated, the bongos, a very Beat
thing. At the same time, it’s almost as if it was an ode to B-films because it was
such a melodramatic score. Maybe on purpose, maybe not, but it felt that way
to me. There was a dissonance, and it wasn’t something that was melodic or
very inviting because that tune isn’t very inviting, but it still seemed melodramatic
to me.
I remember the bongos, when Tamiroff is climbing and breaking that
window, and then Quinlan takes him by the neck and Tamiroff is dangling.
The bongos were kicking in there like crazy; I felt like I was in a Beat