The evolution of Touch of Evil from novel to film provides us with rich material for an inquiry into the making of an Orson Welles film. The movie is a film noir classic. Along with The Magnificent Ambersons and perhaps Lady from Shanghai, it is one of Welles's most intriguing films after his universally acknowledged masterpiece Citizen Kane. It is also, to some extent, a typical film for Welles-if any Welles film can be called typical-for it involves the adaptation of story material supplied by others. No controversy over "authorship" surrounds Touch of Evil, however, as is the case with Citizen Kane. No one doubts that Welles is the author of Touch of Evil in some meaningful sense of the word, despite the fact that the film is derived from a novel written by two other men and despite the fact it passed through the hands of a scriptwriter other than Welles before it reached him. It is tacitly assumed that Welles reshaped and deepened the material he inherited to give it more resonance or to suit his own interests. Yet precisely how this happened has not been adequately explained. One prominent Welles critic, Joseph McBride, has even reported erroneously that Welles never read the original novel,' and another critic, James Naremore, perhaps the ablest writer on Touch of Evil to date, has stated that the screenplay by the other scriptwriter is "not available for study."2 Primary documents, however, are available from various sources which allow us to examine the evolution of the work through its major stages, and to clarify the contributions by each of the parties involved. Such a project should reveal more precisely the extent of Welles's indebtedness to his previous sources and the ways in which he reshaped that material to make it his