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Amidst the final years of Hollywood’s classical era, Orson Welles provided another one of the last examples of film-noir to define the era with Touch of Evil. Much has been made of the film’s already troubled production on the count that on its theatrical release, Welles’s original vision never got its time to shine on the big screen but in subsequent years, traces of his vision that have been eliminated from the theatrical cut whether it be in the 1976 release that runs 108 minutes and unfortunately with the complete loss of Welles’s original rough cut, there is no true “director’s cut,” although the closest we have is a 111 minute long restoration as supervised by Welles himself released in 1998. Yet none of this ever hides a master at work, especially for as close to his vision as we can find ourselves, and what shines out is one of the most self-reflexive examples of the craft to have come out from the system.

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