The last of the classic Hollywood film noir crime movies was Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958). It takes place in a fictional Mexican border town, Los Robles, but was filmed in Venice Beach, because the place looked convincingly seedy, particularly the area around Pacific and Windward. Welles wanted to shoot the film in Tijuana, but Universal refused his request – that location shoot would be too expensive. So this was it.
Without the studio's permission the film was screened at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, where judges Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut awarded it the top-prize. They were only critics then, but within a year there were their first films - À bout de souffle (1960, Godard) and Les quatre cents coups (1959, Truffaut) – so it all started here.
The final touch, Tattoo Asylum, Pacific and Windward –
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Technical Note:
These photographs were taken with a Nikon D200 – the lenses used were AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or AF Nikkor 70-300 mm telephoto. The high-resolution photography here was modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0 software.
