While investigating a bombing at the southern border, a Mexican official (Charlton Heston) crosses crooked cop Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), plunging himself and his new bride (Janet Leigh) into an underworld of corruption, vice, and fatal fortune. Touch of Evil's virtuoso long takes, baroque shadows, and hallucinatory intensity proved too radical for the studio, which released the film in a truncated form. Fortunately, history has recognized Welles's arthouse noir as a genre pinnacle; this version was restored and recut in 1998 according to the director's own notes.