Features

Behind the scenes: Touch of Evil

Rare images showing Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and her husband Tony Curtis relaxing between takes during the production of film noir classic Touch of Evil in Venice, California in 1957.

20 July 2015

Orson Welles with actors Mort Mills and Charlton Heston during the filming of Touch of Evil (1958)
Janet Leigh, with her arm in a sling, talks with Welles and Heston. Leigh broke her arm a week before rehearsals started for the film and had to conceal the cast throughout much of filming.
Janet Leigh is visited by her husband Tony Curtis and their daughter Kelly during the filming of Touch of Evil (1958). Their second daughter, future actor Jamie Lee Curtis, was born the following year.

 

Heston poses for a publicity shot in a relaxed moment during filming
Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh between takes in a gleaming 1956 De Soto Fireflite convertible
Charlton Heston keeps himself caffeinated, while camera operator Philip H. Lathrop and Welles discuss a shot
Leigh returning to her trailer wearing the nightwear she wears in the scene in which she is menaced in a lonely Mexican motel. Two years later, she would be the subject of an even more terrifying motel attack, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).
Orson Welles with camera operator Philip H. Lathrop

 

Discover classic British movies

Hand-picked by the BFI exclusively for audiences in the USA.

Try 7 days free

Other things to explore

From the Sight and Sound archive

Elaine May: laughing matters

By Carrie Rickey

Elaine May: laughing matters
features

O dreamlands: why Lindsay Anderson was never the realist he claimed to be

By Henry K Miller

O dreamlands: why Lindsay Anderson was never the realist he claimed to be
features

Bye Bye Love, 50th anniversary: this gender-fluid couple-on-the-run movie had no precedent in Japanese cinema

By Tony Rayns

Bye Bye Love, 50th anniversary: this gender-fluid couple-on-the-run movie had no precedent in Japanese cinema