历劫佳人

这电影有好几个版本。现在网上的基本都是110分钟那版，据说这是最符合奥逊威尔森的想法一版。1958年历劫佳人的制片商背着奥逊威尔森粗略的剪辑后未经试映便草草上映，电影没有收到任何关注，最后票房惨败。后来威尔森看到制片方把自己的作品剪得乱七八糟，变奋笔疾书长达58页的备忘录。他将备忘录提交给制片高层，希望能重新剪辑。但当时好几部电影都不卖钱的威尔森没能得到他们的支持，这份58页的备忘录也就成了废纸。在备忘录的最后，他几乎用上了哀求的语气。在现在这版剪辑中的片头，就讲述了这段历史。

电影开头长达三分二十秒的复杂长镜头，让我佩服不已。秀才点兵里私塾教书的那场连接长镜头，就有点这个意思。镜头开始于一个年轻人拨动定时炸弹按钮的大特写，随后跟着这个年轻人来到一辆轿车前，年轻人将炸弹放入轿车后备箱，在车主带着女伴上车前迅速逃离，车子启动，此后镜头便一直跟车在墨西哥和美国边界的小镇上移动，车子经过行人，小贩，指挥交通的警察，羊群，以及主角墨西哥检察官瓦格斯和他的老婆苏珊。运动的镜头停在两国边界的过关检查站边，准备度蜜月的瓦格斯和老婆正准备酝酿一个吻，那辆载着炸弹的车已经过关，在美国境内爆炸。这个长镜头随即中止，迅速切向被炸上天的车子。这组镜头，在空间上既有横向移动，又有纵向升降，还有远近的推拉，景别一直在大特写和大广角之间转换，这在以后的电影中也得一见。这组镜头的另一个关键在于，除了技术上这个层次，还有那枚随时可能爆炸的炸弹，在情绪上一直引导着观众的神经。

除了这场戏，还有一处经典的电影场面调度。浑身沾满毒品味道的苏珊被混混们弄到镇上的旅馆，帮派首领乔大叔企图诬陷瓦格斯，并将昆兰也拉到自己的阴谋中，但昆兰并不接受这种敲诈，这会让乔大叔抓住自己的把柄，喝得醉醺醺的昆兰与乔大叔在狭窄的旅馆房间里的打斗起来。窗外霓虹灯一闪一灭，激烈的动作也随光影一闪一灭，当昆兰用丝巾勒死乔大叔的时候，手提摄影机的运动使画面癫狂起来，剪辑在苏珊将醒的脸，昆兰藏在昏暗灯光里的脸，乔大叔挣扎动作中交叉往复。昆兰杀死人后，关门离去，情绪的高潮借助霓虹灯照耀在乔大叔眼珠暴突的脸上，这堪比任何一部恐怖片的景象让刚刚从苏醒的苏珊吓得惊慌失措。

影片剧情开始没多久便可以看出，开头的炸弹事件，到后来几乎成为消逝，情节重点变成了昆兰和瓦格斯的较量。这两个男人间的较量，黑色电影中所必需的道德上的好与坏之间的冲突。黑色电影多少是要将这些人身上的好处显现出来，然后看着他们因为种种原因无奈地作恶多端，并且因命运的不可控制而最终惨死，让观众心生复杂的感觉。黑色电影中的悲剧大多都是这样。他们俩身上分别有这着两种力量，昆兰是一种原始野蛮的权力代表，他在影片中出场时，叼着雪茄，从黑暗的车子中挤出肥大的身体，一张脸扭曲到没有人形，但昆兰依然充满正义感相信犯罪的人一定会受到应有的惩罚。瓦格斯代表着法律的威严与规定，在没有证据前，即便凭强烈的直觉确凿一个人有罪，也不能定罪。他的形象高大帅气，仿佛法律的代言人一样。

但这俩人的对立并不是截然分明的。昆兰虽然武断，但他办案高效，在法律的常规手段发生不了作用时，昆兰的非常规手段便起了作用，尽管没有证据作伪证。但片尾通过施瓦泽的口中得知他怀疑的桑切斯确实是爆炸案的凶手。这样的结果让昆兰的违法行为有些模糊和暧昧。从法律的角度来说昆兰是有罪，他理应受到审判。但在观众心中，当得知昆兰妻子的遭遇时，我们对他的行为多了一些理解和包容。另一边瓦格斯当得知苏珊处于危险之中时，显露出来强烈的暴力倾向。最后靠偷听来收集昆兰的罪证同样显得不是那么光明正大。瓦格斯这个绝对正义的人物这么来看就有些模糊了。

这也许就是导演想要表达的，除了复杂高超的表现手法，正是这种善恶交织，目的和手段的互相矛盾，给了影片一种深层次的思考，使观众回味无穷。奥逊威尔森的所有电影中几乎都能多少看到他本人的影子，就像公民凯恩。他的人生同样复杂曲折。

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《历劫佳人》的故事由一场汽车爆炸引出，这场汽车爆炸是全片的第一个情节点，它将故事中的主要人物全部串联到一起，昆兰警官、瓦格斯、苏茜、葛兰迪家族…

一场汽车爆炸后，剧情出现了两个分支，一个是以瓦格斯为正面人物，汉克·昆兰为反面人物的主线情节，此时两个人的目的都是调查爆炸案，找到凶手；而这一情节的起因是爆炸发生在两国交界，共同处理。另一条故事线是以苏茜为正面人物，葛兰迪家族的乔大叔为反面人物，这条线是由葛兰迪家族的行动推动，最终目的是威胁瓦格斯，撤销对哥哥的控诉。

影片中有几个情节点，第一个是两国边界汽车爆炸，将主要人物串联在一起；第二个是在桑切斯家的谈判，此时瓦格斯发现昆兰无证据逮捕买鞋的墨西哥人，出于对法律程序的尊重，对制度的重视，瓦格斯的目的变为搜集证据揭发昆兰，而昆兰也因为害怕自己的名誉受损，加上葛兰迪的怂恿，目的变为设计陷害瓦格斯；第三个情节点是当瓦格斯找到证据后，与一些官员及昆兰的旅馆谈判，此时矛盾进一步升级，在一个制度里，法律和警察，谁能够获胜？这一情节也在其他的官员的对昆兰的态度中左右了观众的观点，昆兰真的有罪吗？昆兰是腐败的官员吗？这里瓦格斯的失利也是使他做出偷听这一举动的直接动机；第四个情节点是瓦格斯录音昆兰，昆兰杀了皮特，最终在真相大白前，昆兰死在了河水中。

在人物塑造上，瓦格斯和昆兰两个人是绝对的对立面，虽然都是警察，目的都是办案，但在行动的方式上产生了巨大的矛盾——昆兰是位名探，高效办案，但却忽视了程序与证据；而瓦格斯凭着自己的一腔正直，坚持凡事都要讲证据。从影片一开始瓦格斯严谨认真的行为方式给观众传递出正直的符号，相反昆兰凭借直觉判断的行为，传递出腐败、堕落的讯息；但随着剧情的发展，当昆兰讲出有关自己妻子的故事时，对人物稍微有些同情，在结尾处，昆兰说自己工作30年，仅有一个农场，加上昆兰死后，警探带来消息，昆兰的判断没有错时，人物的形象更加立体，对昆兰的态度变得怜悯。

瓦格斯从一开始就给人带来严谨、体面的形象，在情节的发展中，瓦格斯以一直以讲究制度和证据为自己行事的标准，在瓦格斯寻找妻子和揭发昆兰的双重压力下，瓦格斯做出了违背自己标准的行为——偷听录音。这里情节的安排使得人物更具戏剧性，也更形象的表现了瓦格斯的也是为了目的出发的人，所有人都没有很高尚。

苏茜在第一次和乔大叔对峙的时候，睿智且机敏，到后来变得被动和无助；苏茜在被葛兰迪家族陷害的极端情况下，不顾一切跑到窗外求助，人物形象多面。

在影片结尾处，也是故事最大的戏剧性情节，昆兰的判断是对的，但昆兰死了，因为昆兰没有在意制度和程序，即便他是正确的，制度和正义，该如何比较。结尾塔娜的台词，“判断一个人有那么重要吗？”也给观众留下了空间。

摘自特吕弗于1974年出版的影评集《我生命中的电影》，英文翻译：Leonard Mayhew Da Capo Press在美国出版的版本。当年特吕弗看到的本片并非如今广泛流传的1998年重建版，而是当年环球公司剪辑的，不受威尔斯认可的版本。如今我们发现1998年重建版做的第一件事，就是去掉了开场的字幕，完成了特吕弗在本文第一句话中的设想。

You could remove Orson Welles's name from the credits and it wouldn't make any difference, because from the first shot, beginning with the credits themselves, it's obvious that Citizen Kane is behind the camera.

Touch of Evil opens on a shot of the clock of a time bomb as a man places it in the trunk of a white car. A couple have just gotten into the car and started off, and we follow then through the city. All this happens before the film starts. The camera perched on a motorized crane loses the car, finds it again as it passes behind some buildings, precedes it or cataches up with it, right up to the moment when the explosion we have been waiting for happens.

The image is deliberately distorted by the use of a wide-angle lens that gives an unnatural clarity to the backgrounds and poeticizes reality as a man walking toward the camera appears to advance ten yards in five strides. We're in a fantasy world all through this film, the characters appearing to walk with seven-league boots when they're not gliding on a moving rug.

There are movies made by incompetent cynics, like The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Young Lions, movies that are merely bluff, designed to flatter a public which is supposed to leave the movie house feeling better or thinking it has learned something. There are movies that are profound and lofty, made without compromise by a few sincere and intelligent artists who would rather distrub than reassure, rather wake an audience up than put it to sleep. When you come out the Alain Resnais' Nuit et Brouillard, you don't feel better, you feel worse. When you come out of White Nights or Touch of Evil, you feel less intelligent then before but gratifies anyhow by the poetry and art. These are films that call cinema to order, and make us ashamed to have been so indulgent with cliche-ridden movies made by small talents.

Well, you might say, what a fuss over a simple little detective story that Welles wrote in eight days, over which he didn't even have the right to supervise the final editing, and to which was later added a half-dozen explanatory shots he'd refused to make, a film he made "to order" and which he violently disavowed.

I'm well aware of that, as well as that the slave who one night breaks his chains is worth more than the one who doesn't even know he's chained; and also that Touch of Evil is the most liberated film you can see. In Barrage contre le Pacifique , Rene Clement had complete control; he edited the film himself, chose the music, did the mixing, cut it up a hundred times. But Clement is a slave nonetheless, and Welles is a poet. I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.

Welles adapted for the screen a woefully poor little detective novel and simplified the criminal intrigue to the point where he could match it to his favorite canvas------the portrait of a paradoxical monster, which he plays himself------under cover of which he designed the simplest of moralities: that of the absolute and the purity of absolutists.

A capricious genius, Welles preaches to his parishioners and seems to be clearly telling us: I'm sorry I'm slovenly; it's not my fault if I'm a genius: I'm dying: love me.

As in Citizen Kane, The Stranger, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Confidential Report (即《阿卡丁先生》), two characters confront each other------the monster and the sympathetic young lead. It's a matter of making the monster more and more monstrous, and the young protagonist more and more likable, until we are brought somehow to shed real tears over the corpse of the magnificent monster. The world doesn't want anything to do with the exceptional, but the exception, if he is an unfortunate, is the ultimate refuge of purity. Fortunately, Welles's physique would seem to preclude his playing Hitler, but who's to say that one day he will not force us to weep over the fate of Hermann Goering?

Here Welles has given himself the role of a brutal and greedy policeman, an ace investigator, very well known. Since he works only by intuition, he uncovers murders without bothering about proof. But the court system, which is made up of mediocre men, cannot condemn a man without evidence. Thus, Inspector Quinlan/Welles develops the habit of fabricating evidence and eliciting false testimony in order to win his case, to see that justice will triumph.

After the bomb explodes in the car, all that necessary for everything to go awry is for an American policeman（本片主角是墨西哥人，此处疑为特吕弗笔误）on his honeymoon (Charlton Heston) to meddle in Quinlan's investigation. There is a fierce battle between the two men. Heston finds proff against Welles while Welles manufactures evidence against him. After a frantic sequence in which Welles demonstrates that he could doubtless adapt de Sade's novels like nobody else, Heston's wife is found in a hotel, nude and drugged, and apperently responsible for the murder of Akim Tamiroff, who in reality has been kiledd by Quinlan------whom Tamiroff had naively helped set this demonic stage.

As in Confidential Report, the sympathetic character is led to commit an underhanded act in order to undo the monster: Heston records the few decisive sentences on a tape recorder, sufficient proof to destroy Welles. The film's idea is summed up neatly in thie epilogue: Sneakiness and mediocrity have triumphed over intuition and absolute justice. The world is horrifyingly relative, everything is pretty much the same------dishonest in its morality, impure in its conception of fairness.

If I've used the word monster a number of times, it's merely to stress the fantastical spirit of this film and of all Welles's movies. All moviemakers who are not poets have recourse to psychology to put the spectator on the wrong scent, and the commercial success of psychological films might seem a good enough reason of them to do this. "All great art is abstract," Jean Renoir said, and one doesn't arrive at an abstraction through psychology------just the opposite. On the other hand, abstraction spills over sooner or later onto the moral, and onto the onlt morality that preoccupies us: the morality that is invented and reinvented by artists.

All this blends very well with Welles's supposition that mediocre men need facts, while others need only intuition. There lies that source of enormous misunderstanding. If the Cannes Film Festival had had the wisdom to invite Touch of Evil to be shown rather than Martin Ritt's The Long Hot Summer (in which Welles is only an actor), would the jury had the wisdom to see in it all the wisdom of the world?

Touch of Evil wakes us up and reminds us that among the pioneers of cinema there was Melies and there was Feuillade. It's a magical film that makes us think of fairy tales: "Beauty and the Beast," "Tom Thumb," La Fontaine's fables. It's a film which humbles us a bit because it's by a man who thinks more swiftly than we do, and much better, and who throws another marvelous film at us when we're still feeling under the last one. Where does this quickness come from, this madness, this speed, this intoxication?

May we always have enough taste, senstivity, and intuition to admit that this talent is large and beautiful. If the brotherhood of critics finds it expedient to look for arguments against this film, which is a witness and a testimony to art and nothing else, we will have to watch the grotesque spectacle of the Lilliputians attacking Gulliver.

-- 1958

第一次看奥逊·威尔斯的电影，深为开场的长镜头折服。密处躲藏的凶手、两国边界小镇的喧嚣、藏在车后面的炸药、看起来就像主角偏偏又总不经意和炸药离的过分接近......一个跟踪式长镜头几乎把影迷的胃口掉到天上和太阳肩并肩。警匪、谋杀、绑架、毒品、边界、折磨美人，可以说作为一部黑色电影它该有的惊悚猎奇元素都有了，剩下的则交给道德灰色地带的正邪纠缠了。而结尾的追踪真相与之形成完美呼应，不经意间存在的危机最可怕。电影开头是一段义正言辞的说明，表示本片曾遭片商私自剪辑，后威尔斯写下58页长信，最终尽量按照导演意愿剪辑成了现在这个版本。

影片最引人注目的不是破案的曲折坚信，而是在破案过程中对执法手段和公正判断的怀疑。一个凭借直觉判案的警察为了验证猜想不惜假造证据陷害被告人，尽管在影片的结束这件案子证实了这个警察的直觉没错，而他在办案过程中依赖直觉、与毒贩勾结、杀人嫁祸铲除异己、捏造证物、严刑逼供被告人等等行为全部超出了执法人应有的职业素养和道德操守，与其说是为了贯彻正义，不如说是为了满足自己作为正义化身的幻想。奥逊饰演的美国警察即便是魔鬼的化身却干了天使的工作，叱咤警界三十年到头来却被最好的同伴枪毙在臭河沟里，给不光彩的人生留下一个尽是谜思的转身。

在构图上，本片利用人物远近造成视觉上身材的大小比对显示力量对比，往往占据画面更多更靠前的掌握更多的主动权和操控能力：美国警察出场时都站在最醒目显眼的位置，身形总要比旁人更为高大一些，特别是处于少数几个人同框的画面里更是如此，唯有贯彻原则的墨西哥警察可以与之分庭抗礼。然而当美国警察第一次被怀疑时怒而出走，在大厅被喊住，此时美国警察处于画面的最远端，又远又小看不清真面目，而日后看清真相与之反目的同僚站在画面的正中间左右为难，而选择调查他的警察站在离观众最近的位置，显得极为高大。三个人连成一条完美的对角线，既显出美国警察自钻牛角尖的一意孤行，也侧面烘托了导演对这个狂妄警察的评价，未来已在这个镜头里得到预言。

有趣的是，在片中屡遭不幸的女主角，即墨西哥缉毒警察的妻子，被当地毒枭用计骗到家中试图恐吓，两个人在镜头前好似上演了一出抢镜大戏：毒枭趁女主还云里雾里之时摆姿态吓唬她，整个人占了多半个镜头，把女主角挤得只能露出半个头；等女主角反应过来巧舌如簧临危不惧反而呛了毒枭一波，毒枭被骂的目瞪口呆反而自己在镜头下只露出半个头，这正是以抢镜之细节突出正邪之较劲。

更为令人揪心的是观众可以在同一框中看到跟踪者与被跟踪者、偷窥者和被偷窥者，甚至是嫌疑满满的毒枭和窝里反的警察，他们互相之间只有前者知道后者的存在，于是观众可以在一方不知情的情况下眼睁睁看着罪恶的发生，这种似乎亲临其境的感觉不免使人心惊。

众多的仰视镜头将角色烘托的高大之余，也将各个角色的心事放大到观众面前：美国警察的自大阴鸷、女主角面临危难的恐惧等等。最经典的莫过于美国警察即将被同僚诱出时的特写：身后被一只巨大的野牛头占据整个背景，狂野之余却也见垂死之态。

黑白电影里的光影对照总是最为明显，美国警察私自杀死毒枭时屋子里的光一明一暗，正邪在这里失去了明显的边界，只留下暧昧不清的杀欲和恐惧。女主角被毒枭手下盯住时也是在黑暗中用一只手电筒晃住她，唯一的光亮反而成了危险的源头。女主角在汽车旅馆被抓住时，脸从光明逐渐到被一个人的阴影笼罩，放慢的恐怖加深了危机的程度。

究竟是坚持正义放过怀疑对象、还是以正义之名陷害真凶进网，这是个死题。毕竟人不是神，会犯下无数的过错；而执法者也不没有审判的权力，不应该凭借一己私欲改变许多人的命运走向。两个国家的两种性格截然不同的警察碰撞在这个边界小镇，其中的火花燃烧起的更多于道德。而关于在汽车旅馆没有给女主角注射真正的毒品这个情节，我只能说还是年代太早口味太轻了。