Touch of Evil (1958) - Opening Scene

The opening scene from Orson Welles's Touch of Evil

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Orson Welles
• Touch of Evil
• Charlton Heston
• Janet Leigh
• 1958
• Greatest Movie Scenes
• Greatest Opening Scenes
• Greatest Film Opening
• Greatest
• Movie
• Opening
• Opening Scene
• Touch of Evil Opening Scene
• Sequence

[jtgreaves]

Not his greatest work

[garfrain]

@jtgreaves maybe not but a masterpiece nonetheless

[garfrain]

@jtgreaves yeah jtgreaves, take your orson bashing elsewhere

[ylfa]

I think I'm falling in love with this scene. Long shots get me going

[naishjam]

@jtgreaves Then there's the fact that there's no dialogue - we're drawn in by the tension alone. We know nothing about the people that we're seeing. All we know is that a bomb is about to go off in the middle of what otherwise appears to be a completely normal evening scene - ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. It's a great use of dramatic irony to draw us into the film. Just superb film making.

[naishjam]

@jtgreaves I think the thing that really strikes me watching this scene is just how technically accomplished it is. I mean, it really is stunning. It's one unbroken, uncut camera shot for five minutes, following several different characters around a highly complex set. Just ask yourself, technically, how would you actually do that? What kind of device would you use to carry the camera around that set, bearing in mind the heights and lows that he gets the camera to?

[soulbeckett]

I was eight or nine years old when my Mother and Sister and I walked down to the oil field South of Washington St when we saw the lights from our kitchen window of our apartment on Grand Canal.

At the edit when the car passes on the boardwalk of Venice the couple looks up toward the explosion and it then cuts to what was shot south of Washington near the canal and some oil rigs which can be seen catching light as the fire trucks pull up.

[soccergoalkeeper1]

Amazing Opening scene!!!

[filmfanman65]

@jtgreaves well that was blunt.