Touch of Evil begins with one of the most brilliant sequences in the history of cinema, and ends with a final scene of equal magnitude. In between unfurls a picture whose moral, sexual, racial, and aesthetic attitudes remain so radical as to cross borders established not only in 1958, but in the present age also. Yet, Touch of Evil has taken many forms. The film as released in 1958 was certainly compromised from Orson Welles’s vision, but a lengthy memo written by Welles to studio heads in 1957 had some influence on a subsequent preview version shown to test audiences (and rediscovered in the 1970s) as well as the 1958 theatrical version. Forty years later, in 1998, Universal produced a reconstructed version of the film that takes into meticulous account the totality of Welles’s memo. In each of these iterations, Touch of Evil remains a testament to the genius of Welles – a film of Shakespearean richness, inexhaustible. The Masters of Cinema Series attempts to honour Welles with this special two-disc Blu-ray edition of Touch of Evil, with the film presented in its multiple versions and aspect ratios.
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