Ebert says:
"Welles was never again to direct in Hollywood after making this dark, atmospheric story of crime and corruption.
"It was named best film at the 1958 Brussels World Fair (Godard and Truffaut were on the jury), but in America it opened on the bottom half of a double bill, failed, and put an end to Welles' prospects of working within the studio system. Yet the film has always been a favorite of those who enjoy visual and dramatic flamboyance. ``I'd seen the film four or five times before I noticed the story,'' the director Peter Bogdanovich once told his friend Orson."
and from www.filmsite.org
"It was regarded as a rebellious, unorthodox, bizarre, and outrageously exaggerated film, affronting respectable 1950's sensibilities, with controversial themes including racism, betrayal of friends, sexual ambiguity, frameups, drugs, and police corruption of power. Its central character is an obsessed, driven, and bloated police captain ("a lousy cop") - a basically tragic figure who has a "touch of evil" in his enforcement of the law. Its other unusual and seedy characters include a nervous and sex-crazed motel manager, a blind shopkeeper, a drug smuggler, a sweaty drug dealer with a poorly-fitting wig, a terrorizing gang of juvenile delinquents, and an intense good cop - an international narcotics officer who is honeymooning (but ignores his wife), all in a sleazy border town (and a number of dark hotel rooms) within a twenty-four hour period."
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