Ask Mick LaSalle:
Is “Touch of Evil” a good movie or not?
Dear Mick: I have to disagree with you or anyone who claims that “Touch of Evil” is a great film. Charlton Heston was grievously miscast as the Mexican American, Janet Leigh seemed to think she was in a comedy, and Orson Welles’ knowledge of marijuana looked to have been solely based on “Reefer Madness.”
Les Girouard, Berkeley
Dear Les: This is true enough. But I think what you’re missing is that, if Janet Leigh thought she was in a comedy, she wasn’t exactly wrong. “Touch of Evil” is not accidentally odd. It’s deliberately odd, playing at the boundaries of comedy and melodrama. People who have only seen the movie on home video sometimes come away assuming the movie is trying to be serious and failing. It’s not. The whole thing is arch, and that includes the opening shot. In any case, I didn’t say it was a great movie, just one of the best films of 1958. There were some genuinely great movies in 1958, such as “Vertigo” and “Some Came Running,” but not nearly enough to keep “Touch of Evil” out of the top 10.
Dear Mick LaSalle: The most wince-inducing movie I’ve ever watched is 1991’s “Father of the Bride” with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton. I was embarrassed for Steve Martin in that milquetoast role and for Diane Keaton, and the daughter who came across as spoiled, entitled and incredibly materialistic. Your comments?
Kim Crow, Danville
Dear Kim Crow: Over the past 15 years, Diane Keaton has scared me on a number of occasions, by being downright evil in roles that were intended (I think) to be amusing. And yes, this has made me wonder about her. My best guess is that she has probably just developed some very weird ideas about what’s funny. Still, having seen her in those roles, I’d be very uncomfortable if — and may that awful day never come — I were to interview her. Nonetheless, I thought she was just fine in “Father of the Bride,” though I agree that the character of the daughter (Kimberly Williams) was horrible, particularly in the moment when she storms out of the house in a rage when her father balks at spending $140,000 on her wedding. That’s 140 grand in 1991 dollars, back when you could buy a house in San Francisco for about 250K. As for Steve Martin, he seems to have been directed to be so obsessed with his daughter that you half expected him to be swinging from a rope by the end of the reception. So, yes, a little wincing was in order.
Dear Mick: Thanks for the meditation on Orson Welles. “Citizen Kane” is admirable, but it doesn’t grab me by the heart. You said of “Citizen Kane”: “Like all great works of art and indeed all products of the human imagination, it lacks something: in this case, warmth.” I’ve forgotten who said, long ago, that only small works can be perfect; great ones are always flawed.
James Pendergast, Sonoma
Dear James: That’s true, and this is important for people to realize, because you can always find something genuinely wrong with anything, but that doesn’t make you clever. It could mean that you’re concentrating on one leaf of one tree and missing the entire forest. Ultimately, no work of art can grasp the totality of life. That’s why we have genres. Genres are like an agreement in advance, between the artist and the audience, that we are only going to concentrate on this little sliver of the human experience, and within that, we’re going to try to say something true. Human apprehension is of necessity limited, for the simple yet amazing reason that, in life, you only get to be one person. But within those limits of perspective and experience, a great artist can still do magnificent things, and we can appreciate those things so long we don’t get snooty and confuse greatness with perfection.