Zsa Zsa Gabor appeared in Orson Welles's _Touch of Evil_ (1958) in the role of a night club/strip joint owner, so she has her (little) place in film history.
_Touch of Evil_ can be read as a (self-reflexive) comment on reputation (or fame), with its story of a corrupt cop Hank Quinlan (played by Welles himself) whose frame-ups of suspects (especially Mexican/Mexican-American suspects whom Quinlan calls 'half-breeds') have been covered up by his 'reputation,' until he meets Mike Vargas (played by Charleton Heston [!]). Vargas, though cast as an honest Mexican cop who fights against Quinlan's police state tactics and investigates his frame-ups, later himself violently assaults young Mexicans whom he (correctly) suspects to have kidnapped and drugged his wife.
Vargas: Listen, I'm no cop now. I'm a husband. What did you do with her? Where's my wife? My wife?
Though as a cop he is 'honest,' he becomes violent and disregards legal limits of police power (not unlike his antagonist Quinlan) when he is acting as husband & 'protector' of his wife and her 'reputation.'
On the extra-diegetic level, _Touch of Evil_ was the last Hollywood film that Orson Welles was able to complete (though this film too was much changed by the studio when it was originally released; the film was recently restored according to Orson Welles's notes that say how he would have liked to edit it), after years of quasi-exile from Hollywood in the years of McCarthyism and blacklisting. Some of the words of Tanya (played by the divine Marlene Dietrich), though said in response to Quinlan, may be also read as comments on Welles the director by our contemporary audience. When Quinlan first appears in Tanya's brothel, she says, "I didn't recognize you. You should lay off those candy bars." (Welles in the film appears as bloated as the corpse of a drowned man, in sharp contrast to the dashing figure he cut as Irish seaman Michael O'Hara in _The Lady from Shanghai_ [1948].) Later in the film (after Quinlan murders Grandi who helped him frame Vargas's wife Susan [played by Janet Leigh] but before he gets betrayed by his sidekick Menzies into confessing his numerous frame-ups [captured by the wires Menzies wears]), Quinlan and Tanya exchange the following words (which may sound prophetic to our ears):
Quinlan: What's my fortune? You've been reading the cards, haven't ya? Tanya: I've been doing the accounts. Quinlan: Come on, read my future for me. Tanya: You haven't got any. Quinlan: What do you mean? Tanya (warning): Your future is all used up. Why don't you go home?
Well, of course, there is no _home_ in film noir (at least no on-screen home--though Susan gets taken 'home' by Vargas near the end, we never see their 'home'), and Quinlan dies at the hands of Menzies (who is himself mortally wounded by Quinlan). Likewise, Orson Welles's film-making career never recovered after _Touch of Evil_. In fact, it may be more accurate to say that Welles's career died with the collapse of the Popular Front Culture, and that is why _Touch of Evil_ is not only an "epitaph of film noir" (as Paul Schrader claimed), but also a belated obituary for the death of the mass cultural & political movement on the Left in which Welles played an important part.
What remains at (and after) the end of the film? Garbage heaps and seedy streets. Oil derricks "pumping up money, money, money..." (as Quinlan says, comparing his slipping hold on a tiny bit of local police power to an immense flow of capital that has and will accumulate more wealth and power). The polluted water of the canal in which Vargas must wade to trap Quinlan. Cops who think that planting evidence and framing suspects are what it takes to "aid justice." Replying to Menzies who asks how many he framed, Quinlan answers: "No one--nobody that wasn't guilty, guilty, guilty. Every last one of them--guilty." As the still increasing prison population in America proves, we are still living with the debris of the 'touch of evil' that destroyed much of the Left.
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