The LA Confidential of its day, this may be Welles best movie simply because it's so beautifully constructed without the freedom he had on Citizen Kane.

Welles never achieved his dream of making Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but he looks long into the abyss of greed and violence here, working at the top of his game.

The famed tracking shot that opens the film audaciously follows a car with a bomb in the boot through a Mexican border town until it finally blows and kickstarts the plot.

The investigation of the car-bombing is headed by the formidable Hank Quinlan, played by Welles under pounds of padding and layers of facial prosthetics to make him larger than life.

Quinlan immediately clashes with Mike Vargas (Heston) an idealistic lawman who attempts to bring an investigation against the mammoth detective when Quinlan's chief suspect is arrested on fishy evidence.

To shake Vargas loose, Quinlan employs Mexican dope peddler "Uncle" Joe Grandi, who risks indictment because of a Vargas investigation, to lean on Vargas' wife Susan (Leigh).

Susan is subsequently holed up in remote motel and terrorized by smacked up bikers (putting Leigh in motel jeopardy a full two years before Psycho).

Labyrinthine though the plot is Welles rewards audience attention with a doozy of a story, nominally based on the pseudonymous Whit Masterson's Badge of Evil although Welles claims never to have touched the book.

Reportedly Welles shot mostly at night to keep meddling producers off his back, making Touch of Evil the darkest film noir with skewed wide angle photography, the ugliest sweaty close-ups and the most caustic violence.

Ten minutes in Vargas is the victim of a near miss acid attack, and as the film nears its shattering climax Susan is suspected of heroin addiction and murder.

This is a world where bad men do the wrong thing for the right reason and where good men allow legality to obstruct the path of justice.

Despite Welles' precautions, the producers took Touch of Evil and recut it when he was off scouting for Don Quixote locations.

In 1998 Welles' memo notes were discovered in Heston's possession and the film was recut to match the director's intentions.

This new version removed the opening credits and Henry Mancini score, ran Susan's motel plot parallel to Vargas' investigation and made subtle editorial changes to add more depth to background characters, particularly Joseph Calleia as Quinlan's partner who begins to understand how ferocious the big man's methods are.

Now recognized as a bona fide classic, Welles had to watch it put out as a support feature to Hedy Lamarr's The Female Animal, despite the famous leads and supporting cast boasting Marlene Dietrich as Quinlan's old squeeze and Dennis Weaver as the twitchy motel owner.

The audience had the last laugh as Touch of Evil is a masterpiece in any form; but what a shame the same courtesy could not have been shown to Welles who spent the rest of his life scrabbling for finance to finish his movies.

Rob Daniel