Marty Jencius and Cindy Rotz cross the border into Orson Welles's fever-dream noir, where a car bomb, a crooked cop, and a studio recut collide in one of the most argued-over films in Hollywood history.

THE ESSENTIALS

Director: Orson Welles

Screenplay: Orson Welles, from the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson

Producer: Albert Zugsmith | Universal-International

Stars: Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, Marlene Dietrich, Dennis Weaver

Cinematography: Russell Metty

Music: Henry Mancini

Running time: 93 min (1958 release) / 111 min (1998 restoration)

Filmed in: Venice, California, standing in for the border town of Los Robles

Recognition: Top prize, 1958 Brussels World's Fair; National Film Registry (1993); Roger Ebert's Great Movies

TRIVIA

- Welles was hired only to act. Heston assumed Welles was directing, and producer Albert Zugsmith let the misunderstanding stand.

- The famous opening tracking shot runs about three and a half minutes and took all night. The final take was shot as dawn broke, and you can see the sky lightening.

- Welles opened day one with two quick close-ups to satisfy a studio spy, then ran an eleven-page setup until 7:40 p.m. and finished two days ahead of schedule.

- Welles wanted to shoot in Tijuana, but Mexican officials refused. In Venice, the oil derricks you see in the background were real, working wells.

- Heston later called his decision not to use a Hispanic accent as Vargas one of the biggest mistakes of his career.

- Welles wore about sixty pounds of padding, prosthetics, and a false nose to play Quinlan, a man twenty years his senior.

- Marlene Dietrich's role didn't exist when filming began. Welles called her the night before, she raided Paramount's wardrobe, and the studio learned she was in the film from the rushes.

- Mercedes McCambridge is in the movie because she happened to be having lunch with Welles. He cut her hair himself.

- Janet Leigh shot the film with a broken left arm, and she and Welles share exactly one scene, which she spends unconscious.

- The night manager was written for Dennis Weaver, and his performance later got him cast by Steven Spielberg in Duel.

- Universal cut about fifteen minutes and hired another director to shoot new scenes. Welles saw it once and wrote a 58-page memo. That memo guided Walter Murch's 1998 restoration.

- Godard and Truffaut were on the Brussels jury that gave it the top prize. The distribution chief who entered it without the studio's permission was fired after it won.

- Quinlan is never seen without his hat, though at one point his hat is seen without him.

- It was the last film Welles directed in the United States.

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Marty Jencius and Cindy Rotz take on Hitchcock's Notorious, the spy romance in which a government man recruits the woman he loves, hands her to a Nazi, and watches.

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS

- Episode: FTC045 | Hosts: Marty Jencius and Cindy Rotz

- Director/Producer: Alfred Hitchcock — his first credit as his own producer

- Screenplay: Ben Hecht, loosely from John Taintor Foote's "The Song of the Dragon"

- Stars: Cary Grant (Devlin), Ingrid Bergman (Alicia), Claude Rains (Sebastian), Leopoldine Konstantin (Madame Sebastian), Louis Calhern (Prescott)

- Camera: Ted Tetzlaff, his last as DP; Gregg Toland shot second unit uncredited

- Music: Roy Webb — Hitchcock wanted Bernard Herrmann, who was unavailable

- Gowns: Edith Head | Edited by: Theron Warth

- 101 minutes, black and white, RKO Radio Pictures

- Budget roughly $1M; $7.15M worldwide, about $1.01M profit for RKO

- Premiered at Radio City Music Hall, August 15, 1946

- Oscar nominations for Rains and Hecht; National Film Registry 2006; a perfect 100 on Metacritic

TRIVIA

- Selznick lost interest mid-Duel in the Sun and sold the whole package — script, Bergman, Hitchcock — to RKO for $800,000 and half the profits. Hitchcock saw none of the money, but got his producer credit.

- Selznick lobbied to swap Grant for Joseph Cotten, whose contract he owned. Hitchcock invoked a clause in the sale and killed it.

- Hitchcock wanted Clifton Webb for Sebastian. Selznick memo-bombed his way to Claude Rains. Ethel Barrymore turned down Madame Sebastian.

- Konstantin, in her only American film, played Rains's mother and was four years older than he was.

- Rains stood three or four inches shorter than Bergman. Hitchcock used hidden ramps and apple boxes, then told Rains to buy elevator shoes and live in them. He wore them the rest of his career.

- The Production Code capped a kiss at three seconds, so Hitchcock built a two-and-a-half-minute sequence that breaks contact every three seconds and never separates the couple. Hecht watched it shot and said he didn't understand all this talk about chicken.

- Hitchcock and Hecht asked Nobel laureate Robert Millikan how an atom bomb worked. He refused, but confirmed the uranium would fit in a wine bottle. Hitchcock claimed the FBI tailed him for three months.

- Shot almost entirely on RKO soundstages, exteriors included, with rear projection. The one outdoor day was the riding sequence at the Los Angeles County Arboretum.

- Grant, usually moody on set, arrived cheerful and spent weeks coaching a nervous Bergman — the start of a lifelong friendship.

- The crane shot drops from the ballroom ceiling to the key in Bergman's hand; the coffee cup was oversized and set far back for deep focus.

- Grant kept the wine cellar key, gave it to Bergman, and in 1979 she handed it to Hitchcock onstage at his AFI tribute.

- When Alicia first walks into a mansion full of Nazis, the music playing is Schumann. When she asks the band for something Brazilian so she can slip downstairs, the suspense cue never comes — it's dance music through the whole break-in.

- The cameo lands about 65 minutes in: Hitchcock drinks a glass of champagne at Sebastian's party and leaves.

- It was the official selection at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946, where the projectionist reportedly ran the reels out of order.

- Mission: Impossible II lifts the plot nearly shot for shot, with a virus in place of the uranium.

- For a spy picture with murder in it, the on-screen violence amounts to poisoned coffee and a slap or two.

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An alien envoy lands in Washington with a warning for the entire planet, is shot before he can deliver it, and goes to ground as an ordinary boarder named Mr. Carpenter while an eight-foot robot waits at the ship.

FILM INFORMATION

- Director: Robert Wise

- Screenplay: Edmund H. North, from Harry Bates' 1940 story "Farewell to the Master" (Fox paid Bates $500 for the rights)

- Stars: Michael Rennie (Klaatu), Patricia Neal (Helen Benson), Hugh Marlowe (Tom Stevens), Sam Jaffe (Prof. Barnhardt), Billy Gray (Bobby), Lock Martin (Gort)

- Producer: Julian Blaustein | Cinematography: Leo Tover | Editor: William H. Reynolds

- Music: Bernard Herrmann, his first score after moving to Hollywood

- 20th Century-Fox | Released September 18, 1951 | 92 minutes | Black and white

- Budget about $995,000; principal photography April 9 to May 23, 1951

- Box office about $1.85 million in U.S. and Canadian rentals, 52nd biggest earner of 1951

- Special Golden Globe for promoting international understanding; Golden Globe nomination for Herrmann's score

- National Film Registry (1995); #5 on AFI's 10 Top 10 science fiction list; 92% on Rotten Tomatoes

TRIVIA

- Claude Rains was offered Klaatu but was tied up on Broadway. Zanuck pushed for Spencer Tracy; Wise argued a famous face would sink the illusion, and the little-known Michael Rennie got the only leading role Fox ever gave him.

- Rennie kept his arms dead at his sides unless walking in full stride, a deliberate choice meant to read as not quite human.

- Patricia Neal assumed she was making a trashy flying-saucer picture and had trouble getting through "Klaatu barada nikto" with a straight face. She later called it the best science fiction film ever made.

- Gort was Lock Martin, a seven-foot-seven usher from Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Too frail to lift anyone, he carried look-alike dummies, and three suits were built so the lacing stayed hidden from any angle.

- The spaceship was wood, wire and plaster of Paris. Putty packed the door seam so the opening appeared out of nowhere, and the ramp closing is that footage run in reverse.

- No principal cast member ever traveled to Washington. The Lincoln Memorial and Arlington scenes were played against second-unit background plates.

- The equations on Barnhardt's blackboard are real, worked out by UCLA astrophysicist Samuel Herrick from the three-body problem.

- The Defense Department read the script and declined to cooperate with a film showing the Army firing on a peaceful visitor.

- North wrote the Christ parallels in privately: the borrowed name Carpenter, the message for all mankind, the death at the hands of authority, the return, the ascent. Censor Joseph Breen forced in the line reserving such power to the Almighty Spirit, over the objections of both writer and director.

- Herrmann used two theremins, two Hammond organs, four tubas, overdubbing and tape reversal, and fixed the sound of science fiction for a generation. Danny Elfman credits it with making him want to compose.

- North said "Klaatu barada nikto" simply sounded good. Wise closed his 1997 AFI Lifetime Achievement speech with it.

CONTACTS

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