Metrograph

A movie you could use to explain the concept of great cinema to a visiting Martian, Welles’s Hollywood homecoming after several years spent in Europe, an acrid late film noir with the seediest black-and-white cinematography you’ve ever seen, features Orson as the bigoted, booze-and-corruption-bloated police potentate Hank Quinlan and Charlton Heston as a straight-arrow Mexican special prosecutor who, on honeymoon in Quinlan’s raggedy border town, starts sniffing around one of the Captain’s dodgy investigations. Outraged by Universal’s recutting of his film behind his back, Welles fired off a 58-page memorandum to head of production Edward Muhl, unheeded at the time, but 40 years later picked up and followed as closely as possible, with extant materials, by Walter Murch, his scrubbing of credits and Henry Mancini’s score from the legendary three-and-a-half minute crane shot that opens the film only the most obvious of many alterations.

Distributor: Universal