THE WELLES WAY TO `TOUCH OF EVIL' : STARS HESTON AND LEIGH AMONG THOSE PLEASED WITH POSTHUMOUS DIRECTOR'S CUT.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

Like most of Orson Welles' work, ``Touch of Evil'' needed rescuing.

The last feature Welles directed in America, the 1958 film noir has been widely admired for 40 years, even considered his most completely realized Hollywood film outside of ``Citizen Kane.''

Yet none of the three versions of ``Touch of Evil'' that have circulated over the decades have quite accurately reflected Welles' vision. But now, working from a 58-page memo Welles wrote after seeing Universal Studios' cut of ``Evil'' shortly before its release, producer Rick Schmidlin and Oscar-winning editor and sound expert Walter Murch have created the closest thing to Welles' ideal concept as could reasonably be executed.

And, believe it or not, the original movie maverick's plan turned out to be more audience-friendly than the skittish studio's approach ever was.

``After three weeks of cutting the film piece by piece, Walter and I watched it for the first time from beginning to end,'' says Schmidlin, a film historian and producer who's worked primarily in the documentary field. ``We didn't know if it was going to be more artistic, quirkier or really incoherent, as the studio thought it was. But what we found was a more commercially accessible movie - an easier movie to follow, where the plot points were made much clearer than they had previously been.

``That was all that Welles was asking for. He was asking for clarification to make this film play, not more confusing or arty. He wanted everybody to enjoy it.''

Universal's jitters were understandable (if, in the long run, inexcusable). Wallowing in sleaze and psychic darkness, ``Evil'' was a tough sell even in the heyday of B exploitation movies.

``Orson addressed all sorts of things in the movie before it was really fashionable to do so,'' notes co-star Janet Leigh, who played Susan Vargas, the new wife of a Mexican narcotics cop whose border-town honeymoon is interrupted by a series of harrowing events orchestrated by Welles' corpulent, racist and murderously corrupt police chief, Hank Quinlan. ``The way Quinlan treats Vargas, having Susan be a modern, feisty woman, bringing in drugs, gangs, rape, bombs blowing up ... I mean, it's very today, he just was very ahead of his time.''

At least as alarming as the movie's controversial content was the filmmaker's reputation. ``Kane,'' Welles' 1941 debut, was then, like today, recognized as the greatest American movie of all time. But it had been a commercial underperformer, and the director's follow-up, ``The Magnificent Ambersons,'' was mangled by RKO far worse than ``Evil'' ever was while Welles, when he should have been in Hollywood defending his cut, was romping in Rio.

This was the beginning of a depressing pattern: Welles would shoot a brilliant if difficult film, get disheartened in the post-production phase, then leave the country while the studio did reshoots and made its own cut.

Not that Universal was thrilled about that prospect, either. In fact, although the studio was happy to have him play Quinlan, it's doubtful Welles would have gotten the ``Evil'' directing assignment if the biggest actor of the era had not quietly insisted on it.

``One of the things I'm most proud of in my career was persuading a studio to provide the maker of `Citizen Kane' with the last film he made in America,'' says Charlton Heston, who played the incorruptible cop Mike Vargas just after portraying Moses in ``The Ten Commandments'' and two years before winning an Oscar in ``Ben-Hur.''

``I was hunting in Michigan during Christmastime, and I took a couple of scripts along to read. One of them was called `Badge of Evil' (also the title of the pulp detective novel on which the film was loosely based). When someone from the studio called to ask what I thought, I told him I was interested and asked who was directing.

``They said, `We don't have a director yet. But we have Orson Welles to play the heavy.' I said, `He's a pretty good director, y'know.' Then there was an `Um - yeah - ``Citizen Kane.'' Interesting idea. We'll get back to you.'

``I know, when I hung up, they didn't say `Gee, that Chuck Heston is so smart.' They probably went, `Oh Christ, stupid actors. Well, we don't want him to get sore. How bad can it be?' ''

Pretty great, actually. Welles completely rewrote the dull script in a few weeks. He hired Russell Metty, a director of photography who was that rare combination of fast and good, and an eager and inventive young composer named Henry Mancini. He then oversaw a fertile rehearsal period in which some of the weirdest film performances ever registered - Marlene Dietrich's fatalistic fortuneteller, Akim Tamiroff's gleefully amoral crime boss, Dennis Weaver's terrified and totally tetched motel clerk - were developed.

And on the first day of shooting, Welles pulled off one of the most complicated moving shots ever attempted, a one-take planting-of- and search-for-evidence sequence in a small house involving some dozen characters and reams of dialogue.

The studio was already nervous.

``Orson didn't turn a camera on until 2 in the afternoon,'' Heston recalls. ``The studio guys were going nuts. Then he did about 10, 12 takes. By the time it was nearly 6 o'clock, and we'd just about blown the whole day, he said, `Cut. Print that. That's a wrap on this scene, and we are three days ahead of schedule.' ''

And that wasn't even ``Evil's'' most celebrated scene. The justly influential, three-minute-plus opening sequence, filmed just before dawn in Venice, Calif., follows the planting of a car bomb, its path across the border into Mexico and subsequent rude interruption of the newlyweds' evening stroll.

The most noticeable difference between the new cut and previous versions is that this pre-Steadicam masterpiece of fluid logistics and camera choreography now appears without distracting opening-credit titles. They now run at the end of the film proper, which is actually shorter than earlier versions due to a few quick cuts made according to the memo's instructions.

While subtle changes in picture editing make relationships between characters stronger and easier to follow, the film's soundscape has been much more noticeably altered to reflect Welles' then-groundbreaking ideas.

``We had to reconstruct the music in the opening of film because it had to come from various sources,'' explains Schmidlin. ``He only felt that two basic themes of music should be needed to score this film, and the rest of it should come from ambient sources: radios, jukeboxes, room speakers, a pianola. Now, that's basically what we have.''

Ironically, Murch used similar sound techniques a generation after Welles conceived them in his mixes for such films as ``The Godfather'' and ``American Graffiti'' - unaware, at the time, that Welles had thought of them first.

It was this almost extra-sensory attunement to Welles' way of thinking that convinced Schmidlin he needed Murch, who won both editing and sound Oscars for ``The English Patient,'' to achieve Welles' goals.

``I didn't know Walter, but I pleaded with him on the phone to do this,'' Schmidlin admits. ``He knew sound and picture, and Welles was asking for sound and picture. There wasn't much room for interpretation (of the memo), but I needed Walter Murch to understand the intellect of Welles.

The results, though modest compared to many other recent ``director's cut'' reconstructions, are nonetheless profoundly pleasing.

``We're not talking about a restructuring of the whole film,'' Heston notes. ``We're not talking about a wreck that they somehow put wheels on. I'm delighted with the film as it stands; I was pleased with the film when we made it.''

``I knew that the studio was fiddling around because we had to go back and do retakes,'' Leigh recalls. ``Neither of us really wanted to, but contractually we had to. What they were meant to do was round this out into a smoother kind of movie, which of course it was not meant to be.

``When I saw it initially, I liked it, but I did miss some of the sharpness that should have been there. When I saw the re-edited version, I was so excited, because I saw the movie that (Welles) had envisioned, I saw what he meant to say. Which was: This is not a pretty picture, guys and dolls. This is a tough, rough, mean, dirty, dark, grimy movie. It wasn't `Mr. Blandings' Dreamhouse'; this was a jab 'em, jar 'em, shake 'em up kind of movie.

``Now that's what I've seen, and it makes me very happy,'' Leigh concludes. ``I'm really quite emotional about it.''

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Photo

PHOTO Charlton Heston, left, in ``Touch of Evil'' with Orson Welles, says he convinced the studio to let Welles direct the picture as well as appear in it.