Choice 评论

Orson Welles is considered by many critics to be America's greatest filmmaker, and his recent death means that his work is now finished. Terry Comito has done a good job in producing a readable script of Welles's Touch of Evil (Universal International, 1958), a film frequently used in cinema courses and often shown by cinema clubs. This is a welcome addition to the growing collection of scripts of film classics, one to put on the shelf next to Welles's Citizen Kane (RKO Radio Pictures, 1941), the film used in virtually every course on the history of cinema. Comito prefaces the script with an intelligent introductory essay and also includes a study of the film's sources, a sampling of critical reaction to the film in 1958, and some criticism. There is, in addition, a 1958 interview with Welles, translated from the Cahiers du Cinema, that will interest film scholars who have not been able to read it before. Recommended for every academic and public library maintaining a collection of works on cinema.-A. Thiher, University of Missouri-Columbia