Jump to: navigation, search

Boston Globe (20/Sep/1998) - A Touch of Genius

Details

Article

A Touch of Genius

Still lovely and ultra-thin at 71, legendary film star Janet Leigh came to the silver-anniversary celebration of the recent Telluride Film Festival, like so many others, to promote a film. With the exception of her recent cameo in "Halloween: H20" (which also starred her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis), however, Leigh doesn't really do many movies these days. Rather, she came to launch the re-edited version of a 40-year-old classic made by master filmmaker and industry bad boy Orson Welles, whose first film was "Citizen Kane." The movie is in the middle of a weeklong engagement at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge.

Primarily known for her role in the famous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film "Psycho," Leigh seemed excited to be talking, for once, about something different. Welles's "Touch of Evil," made two years earlier than "Psycho," is a baroque, over-the-top tale of murder and mayhem set near the Mexican border and stars Charlton Heston as a Mexican detective, Leigh as his American bride, and Welles himself as a memorably corrupt cop named Quinlan. The film is filled with Welles's signature visual and aural effects and is permeated with a suggestive weirdness that has made it a critical favorite for four decades. But when it was released by Universal in 1958, studio executives decided to flatten out certain aspects in an attempt to make it more palatable to a mainstream audience. Welles wrote a 58-page protest memo detailing all the studio's mistakes, which, of course, went unheeded. Now, as Leigh explains it, "the bad guys have become the good guys," and Universal has decided to release a new version of the film, based on the Welles memo, that has been put together by Rick Schmidlin and the well-known editor Walter Murch, an Oscar winner for his work on such films as "The English Patient" and "Apocalypse Now."

Schmidlin says that the restored version does not contain any previously unseen footage, and admits that many viewers who are familiar with the old version might not be able to tell the difference at first glance. The most obvious change is that the distracting credits have been removed from Welles's three-minute tour-de-force opening crane shot which sweeps balletically from a closeup on an unknown man planting a bomb in the trunk of a car to a long shot over the rooftops, and then follows the car around corners, down several streets, and through customs before it finally explodes.

The film's complicated audio mix was redone according to Welles's specifications throughout, and the director's crosscutting technique between different scenes, then revolutionary, but now standard, was restored, making the characters' motivations clearer.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who was involved in the restoration, said that changing just one shot of Quinlan's sidekick Pete Menzies (played by Joseph Calleia), completely alters our view of his personality and motivation. In all, more than 50 small but crucial changes were made to the film.

Leigh says she was sad when she read the famous memo a few years ago, but thrilled when she finally got to see the re-edited version. "The pace, the excitement, and the suspense are much better now. The performances were also greatly harmed. They edited where they shouldn't have and they added where they shouldn't have. They took away the bite -- they wanted mashed potatoes. This was a film that was meant to be rough and hard to eat and hard to digest, and the performances, too. Clearly, the film would have given Orson the status in the industry that he deserved. The business side gave up on him, but not the rest of us. The sad thing is that all the other things that he could have done were lost to us forever." According to Leigh, Welles was enthusiastic about the project (based on a pulp novel called "Badge of Evil") and was serenely secure enough, despite his difficulty in finding work, to welcome input from everyone working on the film. "Every director creates his own aura on a set, and Orson made us feel like part of the creative process." Everyone involved in both "Touch of Evil" and "Psycho," she says, was very conscious that they were making something innovative and even experimental. Comparing the two directors, she says, "Genius reaches its goal in different ways, and what works for one won't for the other. Mr. Hitchcock did his creative work in the planning of the movies. Every shot was storyboarded on the script, he knew exactly what camera lens to use, and this was done months in advance. So he was very relaxed on the set, because all he had to do at that point was get us to put it on the screen. Orson could plan -- the opening shot and the scene in the apartment were very complicated -- but a lot of the creation and the filling out of all the roles were done during rehearsal." She gives as an example the originally tiny role played by the night manager of the motel her character stays in, a supremely comic creation virtually invented on the spot by the then-unknown Dennis Weaver.

In "Psycho," as everyone knows, Leigh's character is killed about a third of the way into the story. "Sure, I was surprised by that when I read the script," she says, "but I figured I couldn't go wrong with a track record like Mr. Hitchcock's. I was impressed by the versatility of British actors who went easily from big roles to tiny roles, so I guessed it was good enough for me." She also says that Hitchcock loved to create an aura of mystery on the set, purposely having a nude model walk around, for example, just to get a buzz going that there was going to be nudity in the film. He also wrote racy scenes into the script that he had no intention of shooting, just so that he could "compromise" with the censors, by removing the objectionable material, to be able to include the scenes he did want. In the famous shower scene, says Leigh, "it was the first time a toilet was ever shown, let alone flushed. Maybe people didn't go to the bathroom back then." She also notes that for the shooting of the shower scene, which took seven days, "there were sure a lot of guys on the set, and they sure had a lot of assistants!" Leigh says that Hitchcock never made sexual advances toward her, as he is reported to have done by many of the sexy blond actresses he worked with over the years. She thinks his lack of romantic interest stemmed from the fact that she had already been making films for more than 10 years and knew him socially, whereas younger actresses like Tippi Hedren, who had been a model, had been discovered by the director and thus remained in his thrall. "He was their Svengali. For them, it was like a god coming and saying I want you to be my disciple. But Grace Kelly and I talked about this once, and both of us adored him." Leigh's performances in these films, replete with a husky bedroom voice and ample bosom accentuated by tight sweaters, thrilled many a young man seeing them at the time, but she says she never felt exploited, nor was she ever sexually harassed. "I mean, Howard Hughes tried to marry me, but that was a completely abnormal situation." She says she never resented her treatment as a sexual object. "I was an ingenue, I was young, I had a good figure. And they're real! I wore a tight sweater, I mean, sure, I'm a woman. I understand the problem if someone is not given a job just because they're a woman, but I like having a door opened for me. Who cares if hurricanes are only named for men? That never affected my life one iota, or anyone else's." In more recent years, Leigh has become a successful writer and is now actively working on her fourth book. "Writing is an extension of acting," she says. "When you play a role you create one character, but when you write you create them all. I feel very lucky, I've never had a blank day, I fight for days I can write." When asked why she had undertaken such an exhausting festival tour for a 40-year-old film, she replies, "My husband asked me the same question. He wanted to know if I was getting paid to do it. But I am getting paid. I was associated with a picture that I think was much better than what was given to the public. Now the public will be able to see the picture that Orson Welles made, and hopefully this will bring him the respect that he deserves. In all honesty, it's a piece of work that I was proud of, and I'm happy that it will now be seen the way it was supposed to be seen, and I'm sure that Chuck Heston feels the same way."

Retrieved from ‘http://the.hitchcock.zone/w/index.php?title=Boston_Globe_(20/Sep/1998)_-_A_Touch_of_Genius&oldid=181108’