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Opening with that shot – a three-and-a-half minute unbroken take following a bomb from the hands of an assassin, into a car boot, and up to its destruction at the edge of the US-Mexico border - Touch of Evil immediately declares itself a stylish noir thrillride. Charlton Heston takes top billing as a Mexican drug enforcement agent who involves himself in the investigation into the bombing, but it is Orson Welles (who also wrote and directed the film) as the shady police captain Hank Quinlan who captures the most attention. His disheveled and disillusioned Quinlan refuses to stop at the edge of the law in his hunt for the killer as he straddles the line between justice and corruption. Welles's film drips with sweat and sleaze as the investigation tears through run-down streets, cheap motels and a Mexican bordello (run by the melancholy Tanya, played by the scene-stealing Marlene Dietrich). A key entry in the American noir canon and a superior adaptation of Whit Masterson's novel 'Badge of Evil'.