Touch of Evil - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Touch of Evil or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Touch of Evil

[kenneth]

Orson Welles refused to recognize the Universal recut of his film, calling it "an odious thing".

[harry]

Orson Welles would often rewrite his script during his lunch breaks, meaning it was pointless for the actors to keep learning their lines.

[alyssa]

The opening scene is one of the earliest tracking shots and the longest: three and a half minutes.

[sylvia]

Janet Leigh broke her left arm before filming commenced but appeared nonetheless. The arm was in a cast, hidden from the camera, for many scenes. In the more revealing motel scenes, the cast was removed for filming and reapplied afterwards.

[sara]

Akim Tamiroff was required to stick the butt of a lamb's tongue into his mouth for his grotesque death scene. Orson Welles felt this was necessary to achieve the proper effect he wanted--a criminal who had been strangled so savagely that his tongue was unnaturally distended from his mouth. As it turned out, though, the lamb's tongue proved to be too disgusting to show onscreen, so Tamiroff's unenviable ordeal was for nothing.

[riley]

Executives from Universal Pictures only found out that Marlene Dietrich was playing Tanya when they saw the rushes for that day's shooting; she had filmed her part in one day as a personal favor to Orson Welles and he had not told anyone about it. She agreed to appear at minimum union wage, but when the studio execs decided to give her on-screen credit, they had to pay her more.

[oscar]

Captain Quinlan is not seen without his hat during the entire film.

[jessica]

Dennis Weaver shot his part on a three-day hiatus from his TV series Gunsmoke (1955).

[ethel]

Among the significant ways in which Orson Welles departed from the novel and the screenplay were to change the character of Mike Vargas from a white district attorney to a Mexican narcotics agent, to change the nationality of Susan from Mexican to American, and to set the film in a Mexican-American border town rather than in a Southern California town. Welles also heightened racial and sexual tensions in his screenplay.

[ken]

The 1975 alternate version added more than 15 minutes of footage and removed most (if not all) of the footage reshot by Harry Keller in 1957, after Orson Welles was fired.

[dustin]

Orson Welles was originally hired only to act in the film, but due to a misunderstanding, Charlton Heston thought that Welles was to be the director. To keep Heston happy, producer Albert Zugsmith allowed Welles to direct. Welles made major changes to the already-completed script, including changing Heston's character from a white district attorney to a Mexican narcotics agent, changing Janet Leigh's character from Mexican to American, and changing the setting of the movie from a small California town to a Mexican-American border town.

[chris]

The film takes place in a fictional Mexican border town, Los Robles but was filmed in Venice, California, because the place looked convincingly run-down and decayed.

[claude]

One of the original titles for the film was "Borderline".