If you’ve taken a Film 100 course and learned about long takes, this is likely the clip you’ve seen, and chances are you haven’t seen the rest of the movie since (I’ll admit it; I have not. Not yet!). It’s one of the most audacious and ostentatious bits of Hollywood filmmaking in its time, and serves as evidence that maybe Citizen Kane wasn’t such a one-off success for director Orson Welles.
The shot begins with a timer being set on a bomb—you’ve heard the thing about introducing a gun in the first act; this movie introduces a bomb in the first frame!—and the bomb is quickly stuffed in the trunk of a car. We see that he doesn’t wind the timer very far at all so we know there’s an explosion coming rather quickly, another reason that the decision not to cut away and instead give us a real-time sense of when this this is set to go off is crucial and inspired.
As the car progresses through the streets of the Mexican border town, it’s kept in frame almost the entire time, until it goes away for a moment while we get distracted by the beautiful stars Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston until the explosion occurs off screen. Any film that has employed a continuous shot in its opening, as Gravity does, owes a sizeable debt to the way Touch of Evil establishes its atmosphere in a single, extended shot to open its narrative.
One of these days I’ll get around to seeing how the remaining 90% of the movie plays out.
Continue reading on the next page…
