Lukcy Leigh

Janet on the reconstructed Touch

Among the many distinctions of her film career, Janet Leigh might be most noted for being featured in two of the most famous sequences in Hollywood film history: the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and the three-minute crane shot that opens Orson Welles's newly restored and re-released Touch of Evil. The former is the consummate masterpiece of montage, the latter of mise-en-scène. Both have been relentlessly imitated ever since, and at the heart of both is Janet Leigh, film icon.

"Isn't that amazing?" says Leigh over a cell phone en route to the airport for Toronto, where Touch of Evil is to be shown at the festival. "They're both so different, you know -- it's like apples and oranges. But -- how did I get so lucky? How did this happen? I'm higher than a kite right now, because I'm just so thrilled at the picture's reception. I mean, each day, it just seems to get better and better, and I think, 'Finally! We're really going to be able to appreciate the legacy that he left us!' "

Part of that legacy is the legend of the misunderstood genius, uncompromising about his art and thus a persona non grata in Hollywood. But not to Leigh. "Persona non grata? Not in our shooting. That and the two weeks' rehearsal was a sheer delight! We knew it was innovative, we knew it was different; no one knows if the public's gonna think so, you know. But we felt that we were part of something that was historical."

The trouble came after the shooting, during post-production.

"Orson gave his cut. Then they made some changes, but he said, `I can live with this.' And he went to Mexico [to shoot his unfinished independent film Don Quixote]. Well, then what they did was they really re-edited it, and changed much of the intent, many of the relationships, and tried to make it what they considered at that time to be a normal, neat little package of a B picture. And of course it was much more than that! Orson could never make anything ordinary and had no intention of doing so. They didn't understand that at all, this didn't fit the pattern. And then they started to realize that maybe they were, like, in trouble or something, because it wasn't working."

So they started shooting new scenes, with another director, Harry Keller.

"We did added scenes, which were only what they called `clarification' scenes. And they weren't at all; they only confused the matter. There was nothing I could do about it. Charlton Heston had much more to say, as far as clout, than I did. I voiced my objections, and that's as far as I could go. His stand was, `I won't do these added scenes without Orson, the director.' "

Heston refused to shoot until he conferred with the studio head. They cancelled a day of shooting -- which Heston paid for -- but it was to no avail. When Welles saw the new version, he issued the now famous 58-page memo of suggestions as a kind of damage control. That memo, when it finally resurfaced, provided the basis for the new restored version, a labor of love for editor Walter Murch and producer Rick Schmidlin.

"It's clearer and more suspenseful," says Leigh. "They have reconstructed, as close as is humanly possible, without Orson actually being here, the picture he would have presented to us 40 years ago. I have to tell you, personally, when I saw it, I was so emotional, I just cried."
-- P.K.

---

Back to Touch of Evil

---