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As a geometry teacher, I am anxious to use TOUCH OF EVIL in my

classroom. Triangles of light are set against planes of darkness.

Camera angles alter composition and comment and character.

Every actor is a polygon and there is an oleagineous octagon

named Hank Quinlin who is the mud that holds all things together.

The only pretty polygon draws, like flies, the leather chalk dust from

the binary set. American police efficiency (which some might call corruption) VS

grande Mexican slime with a face of righteousness brownchalked

onto Captain Vargas. I cannot equate Orson Welles without using words like brilliant,

visionary, stark-raving mad genius. QED

I was convinced that there was no actor on stage in this brilliant production which basically recalls the man who invented stand-up comedy when he wasn't writing classic novels. That was MARK TWAIN on stage with sage words such as "Truth is our most valuable commodity. So we economize it." I woulda bet money that it wasn't Hal Holbrook but the genuine article of the former Samuel Clemens, pacing and puffing on his cigar with smoke rings to enshroud wisdom with humor. God made man because he was disappointed with the monkey. My only objection to that line is that I personally did not create it! What Louis Armstrong is to every trumpeter so be Mark Twain to anyone who ever tried to be funny or literary. MTT was ninety minutes long and if it had been nine hundred minutes of Twain-alia, my interest would never have flagged. Has any other country ever produced a more valuable commodity than Mark Twain? The genius of Hal Holbrook was that what he said was so impacted with wit that you never thought of the voice as coming from an actor.

When a movie features stain-glass windows created by obscure

math formulae, madness cannot be very far behind. Russell Crowe gets there and far beyond. When numbers speak in a language that only John Nash can

hear, hallucinations become the norm. Then along comes a

student with ruby red lips and she is no complex number. This

variable called love is distributed through the equation and across

the ages as Professor Nash smashes through the function of

Reality.