On the 40th anniversary of Orson Welles’s passing (1915–1985), paying tribute to one of his most daring and visionary works means drawing attention to a masterpiece that has long remained on the margins of official film history. Touch of Evil (1958), shot mostly at night along the US-Mexico border, is much more than a late-stage noir: it is a watershed film, a twilight work that announces the dissolution of the genre and, at the same time, its surpassing. The story revolves around a police investigation in a border town, but beneath the apparent thriller mechanism lies a fierce analysis of power, corruption, and manipulation of truth. At the center of the film stands the figure of Captain Hank Quinlan, played by Welles himself: a grim, obese man consumed by cynicism and his own idea of justice, willing to sacrifice ethics on the altar of efficiency. His opposition to young Mexican inspector Vargas (Charlton Heston) stages a moral drama that does not resolve into a simple good-versus-evil dichotomy but delves into complex gray areas. The formal innovations of Touch of Evil are still astonishing today. The opening long take, over three minutes in length, has become legendary for its fluidity and its ability to create narrative tension without any dialogue. More generally, the film stands out for its bold use of editing, lighting, and sound: sharp shadows, skewed framing, and nighttime settings create an atmosphere of unease that anticipates many modern cinema obsessions. Henry Mancini’s soundtrack, with its mix of jazz, ambient noises, and Latin influences, further enhances the ambiguous perceptual dimension of the story. For Orson Welles, Touch of Evil represents his final confrontation with the Hollywood system, which had already marginalized him after Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. The film was indeed re-edited without his consent by the studio, and only many years later was it possible to reconstruct — thanks to a famous 58-page memo — a version closer to his original vision. Today, this restored edition allows us to fully appreciate the coherence and radicality of Welles’s cinematic philosophy: an art not of compromise, but of tension and invention. Presenting Touch of Evil today is not only an act of remembrance; it is a necessary gesture to reflect on cinematic language, on the responsibility of the auteur, on the fragility of institutions, and on the enduring relevance of cinema’s darker side of justice. In an era where borders — geographical, moral, cultural — are increasingly unstable, Welles invites us to face the ambiguity of the world, without illusions but with a gaze still profoundly human.