歷劫佳人

看完影片再回來看片名，就在想這什么翻譯呀，英文名Touch of Evil翻譯成《歷劫佳人》，且不說就單單片名就不甚符合，影片內容則是丈夫這邊黑與白較量的戲更多，還是英文原名更符合原片。

本片主要講述了黑色地帶警長昆蘭與白色地帶的瓦格斯之間一場較量，開頭長達3分多鐘的長鏡頭迅速地將觀眾拉入影片，從投放炸彈到汽車行駛一段時間后被炸毀這一段戲著實讓觀眾放松不下來，我也是被這一段迅速吸引，雖然中間大部分的剪輯略顯混亂，但整個影片中光與影的運用、或緩和或急速且恰到好處的配樂還是讓影片增色不少。

作為惡的代表，昆蘭是當地一個頗有威望的警長，就職已經三十多年，在這期間屢破奇案，而他靠的是他所謂的直覺。所以在影片中他栽贓富商女的男友，誣告他是殺人兇手；親手謀殺毒梟弟弟，并栽贓給男主的妻子。在隨后的劇情中男主更是發現歷年來他所破的案件都是有問題的，證據不足或者證據不妥，但是那些案件的嫌疑人都被他逮捕了。如果僅僅是這樣，那么昆蘭這個角色就會單薄的多，事實上他有一個忠實粉絲，這個忠實粉絲因為尊敬他而當上了警察，多年來更是協助他辦案，不管對錯。他還有一個美麗的情人，從他第一次與情人交談中可看出當年他也是個瀟灑少年，或許多年前他也是個正直的警察。那么他怎么會變成現在的一個僅靠直覺與栽贓來辦案的呢？也許是因為他的妻子，他的妻子當年被殺害，而兇手逃之夭夭，摯愛的人離他而去，身為警察的他卻又無能為力，也許這就導致了他后面不講法律制度只講究結果的極端辦案手法。雖然影片最后殺害富商的確實是那個富商女男友，他所殺害的毒梟弟弟也確實罪大惡極，但作為黑暗執法的代表，他的結局不可能是好的，所以他被忠實粉絲所殺，倒在污穢的河流中肥胖的身軀激不起半點漣漪。

作為善的代表，瓦格斯長相英俊瀟灑，有一位美麗動人的妻子，事業有成剛捉獲了一個毒梟。他堅持正義，堅持秉公執法，所以當他親眼看到昆蘭栽贓富商女男友的時候不能置之不理；面對毒梟家族的多次恐嚇或謀害，潑硫酸、栽贓妻子吸毒殺人，種種刁難他都不為所懼；面對昆蘭濫用私刑執法，頂頭上司的層層壓力、昆蘭的重重壓迫他亦要找尋真相。也許他就像多年前的昆蘭，如果他的妻子真的被人注射毒品、侮辱侵害，他會不會變成第二個昆蘭呢？幸運的是，影片中他的妻子沒有吸毒、沒有被侵害、亦沒有留下不利證據。最后瓦格斯勝利了，昆蘭倒下了。

邪惡與正義的較量，虛擬的世界里總是正義獲勝。

摘自特呂弗于1974年出版的影評集《我生命中的電影》，英文翻譯：Leonard Mayhew Da Capo Press在美國出版的版本。當年特呂弗看到的本片并非如今廣泛流傳的1998年重建版，而是當年環球公司剪輯的，不受威爾斯認可的版本。如今我們發現1998年重建版做的第一件事，就是去掉了開場的字幕，完成了特呂弗在本文第一句話中的設想。

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，此處疑為特呂弗筆誤）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

本文發表在本人的同名公眾號、百家號和頭條號“半截小丑”，歡迎關注、交流。

想到導演奧遜·威爾斯，影迷中腦海里第一時間復現的可能是他的《公民凱恩》。然而，除了《公民凱恩》，奧遜·威爾斯還指導了很多優秀的影片，其中便包括了1958年的《歷劫佳人》。影片《歷劫佳人》最讓人津津樂道的便是開場那段長約3分20秒的長鏡頭拍攝。

這組長鏡頭的鏡頭組成如下：

• 由定時炸彈作為開頭，采用跟鏡頭的方式，記錄了施害者把定時炸彈放在汽車后備箱的過程，為這個長鏡頭設下了懸念，正好呼應了希區柯克的那句話“炸彈爆炸并不可怕，等待爆炸才可怕”。
• 緊接著，鏡頭往上升，一對男女（受害者）入畫。
• 鏡頭追隨著車，升起，左移。來到馬路上后，鏡頭先下降，然后往后倒退，畫面變成全景，可以看到交通警察及行人等。
• 隨著汽車走走停停，一對過馬路的情侶（主角）也入畫了，鏡頭落到與他們同等的高度，并把焦點轉移到了他們身上，開始跟隨著他們。期間，汽車時入時出。這無形間將汽車和男女主角建立了聯系。
• 直到邊檢站，汽車和情侶同時出現在同個鏡頭里。通過邊檢站人員與兩對情侶的分別對話，可以初步了解到人物的背景。在汽車要駛出邊檢站的時候，車上女子抱怨好像聽到了滴答聲，但官員卻不以為意。這無疑讓觀眾更加揪心。
• 隨著車開出去，鏡頭再次轉移到主角情侶上，倆人相互擁抱接吻。此時爆炸聲響起，長鏡頭結束。

一個優秀的長鏡頭不僅要在技術上讓人拍案叫絕，還要在故事敘述上起到舉足輕重的作用。而《歷劫佳人》的長鏡頭無疑就實現了這兩點。

• 從技術上，鏡頭的推拉搖移升降，人物的走位以及現場的調度都有很高水平的完成度。這組鏡頭運用軌道、起重機吊臂等工具的協作實現了縱向和橫向的移動，同時在廣角鏡頭和大特寫鏡頭之間的切換十分自然。另外，在場面調度上，汽車的行駛、男女主角的步行，以及最終在邊檢站的會合，都很好地把握了時間和速度。
• 從故事敘述上，這個鏡頭交代了事件起因，設置了懸念，激發了觀眾對爆炸事件的疑問，從影片一開始就渲染了緊張不安的氣氛。同時，此部分安排了男女主角的登場，將男女主角與故事聯系起來。最后，這組鏡頭也交代了環境，讓觀眾對美國和墨西哥邊界小鎮上的混亂和污穢一目了然。

《歷劫佳人》如此精彩的長鏡頭，也使得后來導演紛紛致敬，包括羅伯特·奧爾特曼的《大玩家》、保羅·托馬斯·安德森的《不羈夜》以及鈕承澤的《愛》，都在影片開端使用了長鏡頭來交代故事背景和主要角色。正是奧遜·威爾斯如此嫻熟的調度，才讓電影史多了如此一個精彩的長鏡頭。

如果你看到這里，歡迎點贊、評論。想要了解更多內容，歡迎關注本人的公眾號“半截小丑”。

開頭- -段四分多鐘的長鏡頭讓人驚艷，景別跨度很大，從特寫到全景又變成跟拍拍攝，就這一段完整的時空就把前半段電影的目的與全片的主要人物引出來了，還有他們新婚的信息。本片前半段主要解決爆炸兇殺案，后半段則主要講聲名遠揚的警探做假證，和救助女主這兩件事。對于本片我感到好笑的事，珍妮特.利還是沒逃過住旅館就要發生點啥的宿命，以至于演到這--段時我總感覺她要被人殺害。占卜女郎與警探的感情是我覺得安排的很諷刺的一場戲，似乎離開了他，他的未來也變得不穩定，女郎在結尾時說你沒有未來了，我算不出來，其實警探從沒有走出自己的喪妻陰影，他從來不是一個積極向.上的人，雖然他義正言辭的說有壞人我們就要抓住他。警探的人物反轉是本片一個亮點，但既然是《歷劫佳人》歷屆就真不止一個劫，受男主之前抓獲的犯人的家屬的威脅，和警探的嫁禍，前半段其實一直在做鋪墊，這兩條線相輔相成，極具完整性，甚至還有了因果關系，這讓人感到舒服，一切都在情理中。最后發現男主在竊聽的那段平行蒙太奇剪輯真是讓人捏了把汗，本片劇本上制造懸疑很成功，除了這個以外女主在床頭看到被殺的人那里簡直就是每個人的噩夢,現在許多恐怖片還沿用這一-情節，可以說非常經典了。

節奏慢，看得有點累。一般來說不會沉溺于劇情當中，但觀影過程中肚里仍攢了一堆火氣，覺得男主的角色設定既經典又讓人匪夷所思。看到結尾，發覺事情并沒有那么簡單。為啥警長的老搭檔要背叛他？為啥警長會說“這是給你擋下的第二顆子彈”？第一顆我知道，第二顆有什么深意呢？為啥老情人對他的評價是“他是一個男人”？

看了一圈影評，發覺自己完全理解錯了。警長并非是純粹邪惡的一方，他抓捕犯人依靠直覺和嚴刑逼供，但往往是準的，包括這一次。在面對強調程序正義的理想主義者面前，他破防了。為了避免名聲遭到毀壞，他最終選擇了誣陷女主。而做了30年的警長的他，收獲的只是一條瘸腿，被殺害的妻子，作為全部家當的一個小農場。這一切都是旁敲側擊，并沒有大量的正面敘述。

威爾斯扮演的警長一開始就是一副惡狠狠的嘴臉，從一開始就把我給迷惑住了。導演不簡單。這也側面展示了一個很瘆人的現象。先看了影片簡介，在觀影時默認警長是壞人，只留意到警長其為人敗壞的一面，而對于任何可能的、相駁的線索不以為意，最終就造成了徹底的誤讀。放在現實中，影片就是大眾傳媒，誤讀就是誤殺。這很嚴重了。