Here\u2019s a movie directed by and starring Orson Welles.\u00a0 Makes you think of Citizen Kane?\u00a0 Well, not exactly.<\/p>\n
Charlton Heston is Ramon Miguel \u201cMike\u201d Vargas, a Mexican prosecutor on vacation with his American wife Susie played by Janet Leigh.\u00a0 As Mike and Susie are getting ready to cross the border from Mexico into Texas we watch as a bomb is planted in a car with a man and woman as passengers and in the extended opening shot the Vargases and the car wend their interweaving ways toward the border crossing from Mexico to Texas.\u00a0 When the car explodes on the American side of the border and the passengers are killed Ray gets involved to represent the Mexican authorities in this cross-border incident.<\/p>\n
Local police captain Hank Quinlan, played by Orson Welles arrives with his associate Pete Menzies to investigate the crime and almost immediately start to clash with Vargas.\u00a0 Quinlan is trying to frame a Mexican local who is married to the daughter of the man killed in the car explosion.\u00a0 Vargas works with the local District Attorney’s Assistant, Al Schwartz to uncover a pattern of planted evidence in several of Quinlan\u2019s old cases.\u00a0 At the same time some local Mexican criminals, the associates of Joe Grandi, are after Vargas because of a conviction he got against one of their family.\u00a0 The Grandis reach out to Quinlan and he agrees to allow the Grandis to kidnap Susie.\u00a0 Susie is staying at an isolated rural motel on the US side of the border which is owned by Grandi.\u00a0 Grandi\u2019s henchman terrorize her then apparently rape her and inject her with a narcotic and drag her back to town.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Quinlan, for no apparent reason, strangles Grandi and tries to pin the murder on Susie.\u00a0 Mike Vargas goes berserk and beats up the entire Grandi gang single-handedly for attacking his wife.\u00a0 Then he convinces Quinlan\u2019s assistant Pete Menzies to wear a wire to prove that Quinlan is guilty of corruption.\u00a0 But because of the hokey nature of 1950\u2019s surveillance equipment Quinlan hears the feedback between the microphone on Menzies and the speaker Vargas is pathetically carrying around with him to remain in range of the perambulating fat police captain.\u00a0 Quinlan shoots Menzies and is just about to shoot Vargas when a dying Menzies shoots Quinlan and he slowly sinks into a wastewater pond like a dying whale.<\/p>\n
This movie seems to be Welles daring us to find something good to say about it.\u00a0 I will admit that the long opening scene with the car and the Vargases is very well done and interesting both dramatically and visually but after that this whole movie is a hot mess in every way possible.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with Charlton Heston as a Mexican.\u00a0 Oh, come on!\u00a0 Sure, they put some bronze-o on him and gave him a thin moustache but then it\u2019s still Charlton Heston.\u00a0 He looks like Charlton Heston; he sounds like Charlton Heston.\u00a0 He even walks like Charlton Heston.\u00a0 All he left out was saying, \u201cLet my people go.\u201d\u00a0 Heston runs around the movie with great energy and reasonableness.\u00a0 All the viewers are rooting for him.\u00a0 All the other characters including Janet Leigh\u2019s Susie are making his life extremely difficult.\u00a0 He\u2019s finding decades old evidence against Quinlan and beating up hundreds of Mexican gangsters and setting up and monitoring very ticklish radio-frequency surveillance equipment.\u00a0 And all the time hard at work trying to look and sound Mexican while being Charlton Heston.\u00a0 I\u2019m giving Heston a solid B for effort.<\/p>\n
Next there\u2019s Welles.\u00a0 He looks like he weighs 400 pounds.\u00a0 They must have used a special lens to make him look even fatter.\u00a0 It\u2019s awful.\u00a0 I can\u2019t figure out if they\u2019re trying to make him seem somewhat sympathetic.\u00a0 If so, they failed.\u00a0 He\u2019s loathsome and repulsive.<\/p>\n
Then there are the supporting characters.\u00a0 During the rape scene at the motel, the \u201cnight manager\u201d is played by a young Dennis Weaver who seems to be playing the role as a hick who also is some kind of psychiatric patient.\u00a0 I found him more off-putting than the \u201cMexican biker gang\u201d that is there to torment Susie.\u00a0 But they\u2019re weird too.\u00a0 There is some kind of implication that we are seeing some subculture involving drugs and possibly lesbianism but it\u2019s so confused and furtive that I\u2019m not sure the actors even know what they supposed to be portraying.<\/p>\n
And then you have a very worn looking Marlene Dietrich playing a brothel madame named Tanya who Quinlan still remembers fondly and visits for some reason.\u00a0 The scene is so bizarre that it reminds me of Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles doing an homage song to Dietrich called , \u201cI\u2019m Tired.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s like Dietrich is doing a bad impression of herself.<\/p>\n
And finally, they made Zsa Sze Gabor a strip-club owner.\u00a0 But her part was so minor that mercifully she didn\u2019t have to pretend to act.<\/p>\n
So, who should watch this movie?\u00a0 I guess people studying film in college.\u00a0 Fans of Orson Welles who want to talk about his evolution as a director.\u00a0 And people who like really bad film noir.\u00a0 That should do it.\u00a0 You have been warned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here\u2019s a movie directed by and starring Orson Welles.\u00a0 Makes you think of Citizen Kane?\u00a0 Well, not exactly. Charlton Heston is Ramon Miguel \u201cMike\u201d Vargas,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[3069,1910,3070,3071,2758],"class_list":["post-14567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-charlton-heston","tag-film-noir","tag-janet-leigh","tag-marlene-dietrich","tag-orson-welles"],"yoast_head":"\n