Welcome to “Scene of the Crime,” a recurring column in which we examine single memorable scenes from crime movies.
Scene: Quinlan’s Death
Film: Touch of Evil (1958)
The foggy climax of Touch of Evil takes place just over the border in Mexico, up and down an oil rig, and eventually a garbage dump in a river, as a drunken and slimy Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), who is suspected of a number of crimes by Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) including murder and falsifying evidence, is being questioned by his best friend, Police Sergeant Menzies (Joseph Calleia), who is wearing a wire.
As Quinlan hobbles across the bridges over the garbage dump, his limp is apparent, and highly symbolic. Scholar John C. Stubbs has written, “Welles makes Quinlan a limping figure… Presumably this was done to give a visual emphasis to Quinlan’s moral twistedness, as Hawthorne did with Rodger Chillingworth and Shakespeare with Richard III.” It also reveals a kind of “psychological deterioration”: a physical manifestation that something is disjointed or unhinged about Quinlan. Stubbs argues that Quinlan has deteriorated already (his mind, much like his eventual death in the waters of the dump, is soggy), and, as evidenced by the fact that he groggily washes his hands in the muddy water in an equally Shakespearean manner, could have been driven to insanity. He walks with the cane sometimes, and abandons it at others; having Quinlan lose his cane occasionally hints the degree to which he has lost his mind.
Stubbs argues, “The cane is discovered by Menzies after Quinlan leaves it behind in the hotel room where he strangled Uncle Joe. Welles sets up Pete’s discovery in advance by having Quinlan forget the cane once earlier. (He will forget it twice earlier in the movie.) We may see Quinlan’s act of forgetting his cane at the murder scene as another example of habitual forgetfulness or as a Freudian slip by a man who wishes finally to be caught.”
Quinlan continues to behave in the manner of madman, as well. After confessing to Menzies, Quinlan grows suspicious, shoots his friend, and hurries down from the bridge to where he had been standing (captured by a canted frame, similarly to show the crookedness of what has just occurred) and collapses, belly-up, into a pile of soggy trash only to point his gun at Vargas. Here, Quinlan places an emphasis on the importance and integrity of the “front,” calling out to the retreating Vargas, “I don’t want to shoot you in the back,” and informing him that “this” (meaning Mexico, Vargas’s homeland and jurisdiction) “is where you’re gonna die.” He is wrong on both counts—he is the one shot in the gut, and in Mexico. Quinlan staggers about the trash for a few moments, before collapsing backwards once more, into the river. Quinlan is defined by his front—his gigantic, flabby stomach—and, in the film the “back” of things, in this film refers to concealment; with his death, and Vargas’s recording, the underbelly of Quinlan’s corrupt network is overturned when Quinlan dies belly-up.
The “body” is an important aspect of Quinlan’s existence, not only because his body is a metaphor, itself, as giant and slimy as his own sub-governmental law enforcement body, rank with corruption, but also because, by trade, he deals in bodies—and, sometimes, body parts. According to scholar Eric M. Krueger “Quinlan mentions that an old lady found a shoe with a foot in it: the explosion blew Rudi and his girlfriend into rubble—human entrails to be scattered to the wind like piles of litter.” As a detective, it is his job to solve terrible occurrences such as this, and squash the pent-up tension and corruption in the town that causes such things, but he, a manipulator of people, and a dirty cop who plants evidence instead of digging it up, only piles up the rubble and missing pieces from his cases to aid him in his climb to relative power and respected position.
Pieces of the trash he does not unearth are human remains—he can no longer tell the difference between the organic and the artificial, what is human and what is filth. He, himself, has grown too filthy, too big, too powerful for the heaps of trash he has created, and, “after thirty years of dirt,” he botches up and finally gets caught; “In the accusation scene where Vargas presents the evidence linking Quinlan to a frame-up in Sanchez, Quinlan makes a mess of himself by squashing an egg in his hand. This is, one can add, symbolic of what he’s done and is doing to his life.” Not only does this moment express that Quinlan has lost touch with the delicateness of life—or even artifacts that once held life—but, his own dehumanization (brought on by the accumulation of inhuman, or once-human debris), but it reveals that both of Quinlan’s bodies—corporal and administrative—are no longer subtle.
Quinlan, though, has also polluted the environment with his personal corruption. “Welles,” claims Krueger, “by placing his story in the border-town cosmos, gives us the mad compliment to his theme. All that lies repressed in the mother country thrives on the surface in the border of humanity. It is a place, where anything can happen—where the underside of humanity is exposed.” As such, Quinlan finds his comeuppance, dying on his back in piles of garbage symbolic of the ones he, himself, has created. Not only has he created it himself, though, he has built it around himself—and trapped himself there.
Unbeknownst to Quinlan, Vargas chases him up and down oil rigs and all through a garbage dump, recording his guilty testimony on a radio, but Quinlan has nowhere to run—he is trapped in that he has been set up by Vargas and Menzies (his best friend), but he is also actually unable to escape the from the mounds of garbage and putrid water of the garbage dump. This, argues scholar Susan P. Mains, is symbolic of what Quinlan has done to the Mexican side of the border—and the town of Tijuana. “The setting is not simply a backdrop, but rather reflects the entrapment of the characters: Quinlan cannot survive without being involved in cross-border crimes and investigations in order to overcome feeling responsible for his wife’s death. At this point in the film, he is a pig caught inside a pen he built himself, dying belly up, finally exposed.
This final scene generally reinforces an “undoing” of Quinlan’s whole identity, exposing him for the vile creature he really is. After he shoots Mendies, and runs down to the river, the aforementioned overhead shot captures Quinlan kneeling over and washing his bloody hand in the dirty water. His body curled, he resembles a caterpillar. In his death scene, collapsing among garbage, he smells, he salivates, he sweats, and—his eyes popping out of his fleshy face, resembles a slug. His death among piles of garbage, and dirty water, and oilrigs reduces him to a waterbug or some other sort of a large, junkyard insect—an association he unwittingly articulates screaming at Menzies as he realized he is being both “bugged” and “tailed” by Vargas. Over the border, his true nature is revealed: he is filth, vermin.
