‘What does it matter what you say about people?’

Nothing, because you can’t change anything.
Nothing, because what matter is what you do about people.
Nothing, because what matters is what they do.
Nothing, because what is the point after they are dead.
Nothing, because you can’t explain them.
Everything, because here is the film.

(The editor in Liberty Valance says ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend’, but Ford prints the fact in the film. )

Offset portrait

The action is seen through the dull protagonist. This allows you to have complex portraits because they are not defined by the simple desire/actions system. Allows you to use the narrative system

This is a noir film, with a policeman drawn into an investigation, becoming personally involved, to the point where his new young wife is threatened. By accident he is present at a crime; he takes an interest in the investigation, discovers a miscarriage of justice and finds himself up against a powerful, corrupt local policeman.

But the actual presentation of characters skews this. Though the plot and scene structure follow Vargas in the effort to resolve the crime, protect his wife and expose Quinlan, the tragedy of Quinlan himself, the account of Quinlan’s complex character, the pattern of choices and the miserable outcome become as much the centre of the film as Vargas’s story.
Ordinary psychological drama brings the audience in touch with a character who sees the world in terms of how it serves or frustrates their plans, or represents advances or defences against the attacks the plot and the world make on them. This creates a live, tense, intimate relationship. But it makes problematic the account of a character that acts irrationally, or acts from desires or events has forces that affect the way they respond but that only they know about. So although a film can represent this sort of character in very subtle and complex ways it is hard to maintain the same kind of intense moment to moment relationship with the action.

A solution that maintains the internal relationship but also describes a character with irrational or hidden motives is to have a relatively simple foreground character struggling to understand the more complex character who is at a greater distance. This is how this film works. (I’ve showed Tarnished Angels for example, where a simpler Rock Hudson struggles to understand a very complex relationship in the background). Citizen Kane, Mr. Arkadin, also use something like this but in the first the character trying to work it out is hardly a character, pretty much just a narrative device, and in the second, not far off. But the struggle to understand can be, as here, the centre of the motivational structure of the foreground character.
In this way the main protagonist becomes a structural device to present another chcaracter, contradictions and enigmas intact.

Kennedy

Old fashioned baggy fat policing by brutality, intuition and the belief that criminals have no rights, vs. new well-suited, lean intelligent policing for justice.
(Falstaff and Hal). (Reversal of usual preconceptions between Mexican and American.)

Quinlan and uncle Joe belong in the same worlds so their alliance was inevitable. This is Tanya’s world too. Touched by evil, understanding, sorrow and darkness.
And Vargas and Suzy are also Touched by Evil during their short time there. Things happen to them which shouldn’t happen in the bright world.
This is a film in which someone who was born, as it were, in the fifties, with a clean life and no past meets people from an older world. In fact everyone in the fifties had a past including depression and war, but the films don’t seem that way. This film remembers the past and contrasts people who do with people who don’t. So does Marnie.

Vargas is a new kind of government official: young, good-looking, well-dressed, well educated, well spoken. In all of these things he is the antithesis of Quinlan. Quinlan is an old-fashioned small town official, with an old-fashioned overweight body, with a vocabulary of sneers and insults, who uses intuitions and superstitions in place of law and research.

This is the climate in which the Kennedys arrived, the sense that government could be new and young and modern: words which don’t quite overlap. This is the confrontation between John F. and Nixon, Bobbie and Hoover or Hoffa. Thfilm precedes the election but it is an example of how the people who elected and celebrated the Kennedy’s saw the world, their frame of mind that made it possible, reflecting tension between old world of officials who are old, fat corrupt, unshaven contrasting with federal type officials with better suits and cleaner and better moustaches, reflecting a new Kennedy world about to arrive from inside the Eisenhower world and earlier.

Past

Welles was a Kennedy man. But in the character as developed you can see things that make the picture more complicated. Vargas, like Cary Grant in a Hitchcock film, and many other fifties heroes, has no past. The fifties, like other times, looked for heroes who were born just then, without pasts. The past was a dirty place, with the dirt of a war that many people had seen close up, and the dirt of the thirties, which was the dirt of poverty and despair. Many people who were fifties people had these pasts. They had been through the thirties, and remembered the shame of being poor, and the shame of some of the ways in which they had had to live, and had experiences of the war which weren’t as clean as PT Boats.

Many, many people wanted to forget the ugly past and settle in the clean successful fifties present. Marnie, a little later, is very interesting. Marnie, is composed, well spoken, well dressed, well behaved, pretty. In England some of this would be class, and Hitchcock brings a lot of class to the American cinema. But it also the neatness of the aspirations of the times. What she is hiding though is a dirty past, her mother, and her poor house and dresses and her accent, from which she has put as much distance as she can. What she has repressed and almost forgotten is an even dirtier past, the hard times gone by when her mother was a prostitute living off sailors. In England this would be forgetting the class background, but in America it is forgetting the past.

This is what makes the figure of Quinlan. His body comes from the past, when people were thin or fat, but not slim. He carries layer of fat and sweats to carry them.

In a sense his body is his past, as is the case with the kinds of characters that fill Dickens or Gogol, whose pasts have twisted them in an entirely recognisable way, who are walking, or limping, social histories.

He has no education and no legal principles. He certainly doesn’t have a cause or a campaign. He has two things in place of that, and both of them are accretions of pastness. One is hate, hate for killers. This is the source of his determination to catch them. The dialogue suggests that it comes from what happened to his wife, but it doesn’t really have to. The character is full of forces that come out of the primeval time before the film starts. His attitude to Vargas is an example. The scene where he offers to resign shows his capacity for emotional power without needing to explain it particularly: it is simply supported by his body and presence, and the fact that in some almost mythical way he has always been there.
And the other is intuition. Intuition in this sense is based on experience. It is the opposite of process and logic. It doesn’t come from the brain but from the wounds inflicted by the past, from his game leg.

Two extraordinary inventions accompany Quinlan from the past: Uncle Joe and Tana.

Place

There are films that use sets to reinvent the world and there are films that use the world to represent itself. There are a few films that use the world to represent an entirely different world. This is a very great example. Another very great example is Alphaville, which is very aware of this film.

It does this with great beauty.

Does place cause characters? There is an overlap here between expressionism and neo-realism in the way in which place defines characters.

Place is full of psychological significance. This follows from Shanghai in the interest in locations, but here much more focused.

Look at the construction of these two places with their border: America consists of wide dusty streets and the shop with blind woman and square houses ; Mexico consists arcades and squares and bull fights. America happens in daylight and Mexico at night. America has the motel in a wide undulating dusty empty space, and Mexico has the hotel on a raucous street.

(Janet Leigh wants to go to a motel to be safe, as the policeman recommends in Psycho).

America is desolate and empty and desiccated and corrupt. Mexico is more complicated, raunchy bars and Marlene Dietrich ‘s brothel emotionally deep.
Here notion of a community has decayed to just the police chief whose way of protecting it is now immoral. Can’t see what he’s protecting so small town life has evaporated. The protective figure has become corrupt and disgusting. Small town life is a corrupt nightmare.

Vargas abandons Suzie to rooms in which windows expose her to the world
Place in which things happen, the container – is a consequence of production design and of camera placement and lens.

The complexity of space includes the movement in it, and the placing of the characters in the space. Welles is fantastically aware of that.

Most of the spaces in the film are relatively anonymous. There is the strange place of the ending which isn’t Hitchcock also used the device of ending in the strange place. There is Tana’s. But the rest is in the anonymous places of the hotel rooms and motel room and the wide American streets and the shapeless plaza at night. Banal and evil. Ordinary places of terror. But Welles shapes them strangely.
Tana’s brothel is full of the past. The pianola – it’s so old it’s new – which once belonged to Lola. Her weird costume, her accent. When Quinlan arrives it is full of their past, which is irretrievable, which is the past because it represents change: ‘I didn’t recognise you…you’re a mess honey’. (‘Honey’ is wonderful). The mess is the change, but later she can see what has happened to him now, and can tell him his future is all washed up.

Quinlan

Everything responds to him, his charisma, authority. Every move that Quinlan makes here is filled with personal authority. His ‘edge’, as Lady from Shanghai calls it. The scene structure is built around giving him scenes where that kind of authority can play out.

In every scene in which Quinlan and Vargas are together, Quinlan dominates Vargas.

Weber described charisma as the attribution of supernatural power, and the film attributes supernatural power to Quinlan: his game leg is always right, his intuition always finds the right criminal; people believe that, but it might even be true.
His real power though is in his presence, the size and shape of his body in his weight, in every sense, in the timbre of his voice, in his unstoppable waddle, in the way his nose sits in his huge face.

Where Welles goes further than Weber is in his fascination with the co-existence of decay and greatness, with the beauty of rotting grandeur (see Chimes at Midnight as well). The complexity here is the co-existence of two opposed notions. The sense of decay is obviously about decline from something, and the film is full of that sense of him going downhill, morally and physically. But the film simultaneously makes the decay part of the power. There is something very disgusting about the figure, the ugliness, the fat, the sweatinesss, but it is just as much part of the authority, as the ferocity, and the power of intuition. The centre of the fascination of the character is how the decay augments the power, fascination and beauty of the character.

Vargas is obsessed with him, to the point of abandoning his wife. Vargas says this could be very bad for Mexico, but it doesn’t seem believable. Not even Suzy believes it. Justice matters to Vargas as well, but it coincides with the fascination of Quinlan.

Quinlan lived in the dull wide streets and then Vargas comes and tugs him over the border into his past.

Before Vargas Quinlan has a balance in his world. His misery and his memory are under control. He has transformed the grief over the murder of his wife into a campaign that essentially contains this, or even sublimates it into something which is at least effective, if not moral. Vargas threatens him and the past walks over him: memories, alcohol, Tania, the relationship with Grandi, and he becomes the thing he was fighting, and is caught in the same way.

He obsesses about the object the rope in his wife’s death. He catches all his criminals by planting objects. In his own killing he is caught by an object. As if objects were the centre of the murders not people with motives. Speaking objects.

These are old-fashioned ways of solving crimes, clues, once the centre of crime literature, but made suddenly old-fashioned murdered by Raymond Chandler. Hitchcock kept clues alive for a long time as well.
Vargas says the point is the law, which actually reflects the theory of the American system, though contrasts with the practice. Debate inside American law?

Vargas

The power of Quinlan over Vargas is the way the plot gives him of handling his wife. In Vargas’s view of the world, the administration of justice is impersonal. But the plot gives him a wife who is threaded through the story, so the plot takes against him from the start. Vargas’s picture of things is that the presence of the crime means he has to distance himself from his wife, but the plot and Uncle Joe and Quinlan think the opposite way and contrive to draw her into it. So Vargas is shown constantly leaving his wife for the plot and not understanding, as of course he couldn’t, that she is part of it and threatened by it. And this becomes a profound emotional failing. It is increased within the scenes his concern for his gun when he should be concerned about the disappearance of his wife in the scene with Dennis Weaver in the empty motel room, or the way he rushes off leaving her in prison, count as times when he could know better, but the effect is the same when he drives past the hotel and doesn’t see her on the balcony. His not seeing her, though he couldn’t, is a failing. In all of them he becomes someone with some kind of defective moral sensibility.

Of course that doesn’t mean he isn’t right in his struggle against Quinlan. But it is a feature of films like this that they can maintain the tension between opposing types of moral thoughts, giving one balance at the level of plot and another at the level of the scenes, or as here , opposing them at the level of character and performance.

The power of Quinlan in the scene on the bridge around the oil pumps in the end, where he dominates just as much, where Vargas is reduced to chasing after him with his uncomfortable machine. The machine seems to give Vargas an edge, but in fact it becomes a tether by which Quinlan drags Vargas along behind him, to the extent of half submerging him in the disgusting river. In the end Quinlan takes it over for his own purpose of speaking to Vargas. The whole ending after that is dominated by Quinlan, apparently helples, lying on the ground by the river.
The script suggests that what has happened to him is in some way the result of an internal passion, the story of the dead wife and the rope. But in a way that is subordinated. As far as it works it would work to suggest that because it is a real passion, what moves him is not evil in the narrow sense. But the film really doesn’t make much of it. But casue is suppordinated to being, to the quality of what he is. What does count just as much, in the equation of loss, is whatever may have happened with Tana, the complexity of the brief encounters that they have which suggests her knowledge of him.

Vargas’s role is not primarily as a moral centre for the film even though judgements proceed from him. His role is a challenge to the authority of Quinlan, and the fact that it has moral weight is relevant only in terms of Vargas’s conviction and not the film’s organisation. Vargas comes from the other world across the border, doesn’t know Quinlan’s history and sees him in the present, as a disturbing wrecked figure. Where the other characters see magic, he sees bullying and injustice. But his challenge doesn’t bring down Quinlan. What brings down Quinlan is Quinlan’s catastrophic response to the challenge, ie a tragic decision. It is Quinlan’s decision to ally himself with Uncle Joe, and alcohol, and the dark world that results that destroys him. The challenge starts a process, an the magic authority creates the grotesque chaos of the murder of Uncle Joe. The awfulness of what happens in that room is a response to Vargas. It isn’t there before, that isn’t the world that Vargas challenged.

Vargas is a structural device to present the complexity of Qunilan. Here though the character who has to understand, Vargas, is obviously complex in his own way, and that is engineered by making the understanding part of a plot, and therefore the consequence of his commitment to other things in the world, like justice for Sanchez, or protecting his wife.

Apart from trying to understand Quinlan for us, Vargas brings a moral edge to the film. He has a strong sense of what is right and wrong, and is motivated by that. We can share, or at least have a strong relationship to this system of judgement. So our developing understanding of Quinlan is also a developing moral relationship. Of course in part it comes from our seeing things directly like the murder of Uncle Joe but it is also shaped by Vargas processes of discovery and valuation, as in the discovery that Quinlan has planted the dynamite, or in a more subtle way, by watching Vargas learning about Quinlan’s brutality to Sanchez in the same scene.
Vargas is an essentially decent character, whose morality is never really seriously in doubt. He is good-looking, well dressed, educated and has appropriate ideas about legal procedures and justice, and is rightly shocked at the torture of suspects and the planting of evidence. He is also strong willed enough not to give up. He is a senior figure in the Mexican government, and has a suitable personal weight after all he is played by Charlton Heston who had enough weight, in the sense of physical authority and strength of feature to plays Moses.

There is in the film a complex opposition between the two sides of the border, but it is interesting that in this way at least it is non-traditional: that it has this decent , morally direct character as a Mexican and the corrupt character as an American. So whatever else is going in the film’s dichotomies, this is not a traditional typing.
But quite a lot of what is interesting about the film comes from a pattern of more complicated tensions around Vargas.
The first is that, in purely rational terms, his main decision is unmotivated. There isn’t really a reason for him to take up the Sanchez case. He is, as he points out, in a foreign country, and has no jurisdiction. And he even says to Suzy; ‘there’s nothing I can do over here’.
Of course to say that he has no rational reason to get involved doesn’t mean that he has no reason. It is a blank in the motivational structure which allows something more complicated to creep in. Rational motivation here is replaced by a process that he can’t stop, which has to do with the explosion, and Quinlan, a process generated much more viscerally than logically.
There is the kiss and the explosion, and he rushes forward into a strange world of flames and running people, already caught irresistibly.
There is a great gap between Vargas’s sense of Quinlan and ours. Vargas is used to give a moral measure, and does, so we can see what is wrong about what happens. And Vargas is fascinated by the power of Quinlan, and horrified by his misuse of his position. But Vargas can’t see the glory in Quinlan. Tana can, and we can, but Vargas never gets near it.