Top 250 Challenge: 167

Touch Of Evil (1958)
Number 78 on IMDb's Top 250

An automobile is blown up as it crosses the Mexican border into the United States. Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston), a high ranking Mexican narcotics official on honeymoon with his bride Susie (Janet Leigh) is drawn into the investigation because a Mexican national has been accused of the crime. The figurative and physical presence of Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) as the 330 pound sheriff looms all over. Quinlan is a fanatic where "justice" is concerned, even if obtaining it involves planting evidence. Quinlan's reputation for law and order enables him to bend the law without question until Vargas confronts him. From that point on hilarity ensues, and it's a battle of wits between the two that, with an accelerating pace, rushes to a thrilling climax.

Trivia: Alfred Hitchcock reportedly reworked Dennis Weaver's quirky motel clerk character in this one for Psycho (1960). Orson Welles was originally hired only to act in the film, but due to a misunderstanding, Charlton Heston understood that Welles was to be the director. To keep Heston happy, producer Albert Zugsmith allowed Welles to direct. Welles made major changes to the already-completed script, including changing Heston's character from a white district attorney to a Mexican narcotics agent, changing Janet Leigh's character from Mexican to American, and changing the setting of the movie from a small California town to a Mexican-American border town.

Okay, finally I see a stinker in this top 250 list. I didn't like this movie. Orson Wells was in his Fat Elvis phase at 330 pounds and it is just uncomfortable to watch him. Charlton Heston as a Mexican Official...right...okay. Heston is so concerned with his newlywed wife that after the explosion in the beginning of the movie he tells her to walk back to the hotel herself. She gets rerouted by people who don't like Heston and is threatened. Naturally, she wants to leave the Mexican hotel and stay in one on the American side of the border. So Heston says something like she doesn't believe he can take care of her and then drives her across the border (at the beginning of the movie, the border was in the middle of the town. Now Heston drives through miles and miles of empty plains). Half way to the new hotel, they are stopped by the police who pick up Heston, and leave behind a subordinate cop to take Ms. Heston the rest of the way to a deserted hotel...and then leaves her there. Heston, still concerned about his new wife that he calls her once and doesn't show up at the hotel until dark (she was left at the hotel at 7 a.m.) but by that time she had been harassed by the bad guys, drugged, dragged back across the border and framed for the murder of a gang leader. Did I mention Charlton Heston is a Mexican Official? He even sports a bad pencil thin mustache. I think I would have trouble putting this in the top 250, much less in the 70s as it is. I just don't see it. I think this movie lives on reputation, that of Orson Wells.