Tamiroff is fine as Grandi, the vulgar narcotics kingpin whose dirty work is carried out by several vicious, leather-jacketed nephews. The character is both menacing and comical, qualities Tamiroff brought to many characterizations. A short, fat, wild-eyed schemer, he wears a heavy toupee that continually goes askew. His Moscow Art Theatre accent comes through amusingly on occasion, as when he addresses Susan as "Mrs. Wargas."
Dietrich, German accent notwithstanding, wears a black wig and smokes cigars as the hard-eyed madam of a bawdy house. She initially doesn’t recognize Quinlan when he wanders into her refuge, which he had frequented in better days. In most of her scenes she seems dispassionate, coldly informing her former client, "You’re a mess, honey. You’d better lay off those candy bars," and then telling him, after consulting her tarot cards, "Your future is all used up." Yet at last, when she divines that Quinlan is in danger, she runs outside calling his name. She soon meets Schwartz, who is looking down at Quinlan’s corpse lying in a pool of oily water. "You really liked him, didn’t you?" he asks the madam. Without apparent emotion, she replies memorably, "The cop did, the one who killed him. He loved him. He was some kinda man. What does it matter what you say about people? Adios."
Gabor, speaking Hungarian-tinged English, looks glamorous in her brief scenes as proprietress of the Rancho Grande, where the murdered girl had been one of "20 Gorgeous Strippers." A number of other Welles chums also joined the cast for unbilled cameos. Billy House, a rotund old stage comedian, and Gus Schilling, one of Welles’s Mercury players and a star of Columbia two-reel comedies, play highway construction men. Mercedes McCambridge is a sadistic lesbian in black leather who joins the boys converging on Janet Leigh in the motel while two girlfriends watch. Keenan Wynn and John Dierkes are just part of the ambience. Joseph Cotten, as a grouchy, cigar-smoking medical examiner wearing a rube hat and toothbrush moustache, first appears at the scene of the bombing. When the police chief comments that Linnekar had the town in his pocket just an hour before being blown to smithereens, Cotten adds, "Now you could strain him through a sieve." When Vargas says he wants to meet Quinlan, Cotten growls, "No you don’t." Later, outside Susan’s jail cell, he rants about "articles of clothing, half-smoked reefers, needle marks you can smell the stuff on her."
More conspicuous is Dennis Weaver, then an obscure Universal contract player prior to his stardom on TV, who does an eccentric turn as the twitchy, half-witted night-manager of the desert motel. A raw-nerved religious fanatic, woman-hater and shrieking coward, the character is fascinating but overly flamboyant.
Even among these performers, one man’s sincerity stands out. Joseph Calleia, the veteran actor from Malta, makes Menzies the most realistic and touching character in the film. Throughout the first three-quarters of the movie he frisks around Quinlan like a faithful dog, barking at anyone who crosses his boss. It is heartbreaking to see his eyes well up as he watches Quinlan, influenced by Grandi, returning to the bottle after 12 years on the wagon. Even after he realizes his friend is a monster, Menzies tries to defend him, recalling how Quinlan once saved his life by taking a crippling bullet meant for him. When he realizes at last that he must betray his friend, he becomes a stricken man tormented beyond endurance. His agony is the true touchstone of the film.
Principal photography for Touch of Evil was completed in five weeks, on April 1, 1957, and Welles delivered a roughly edited cut the following month. The job of scoring the picture was assigned by musical director Joseph Gershenson to Henry Mancini, who at that time was one of the industry’s staff composers, working anonymously in the shadows of musical directors. Welles had requested "musical color" incorporating "Afro-Cuban rhythms" and "traditional Mexican music" mixed with contemporary rock music, most of it coming from onscreen sources such as jukeboxes, car radios, cheap gramophones, loudspeakers and a player piano. He wanted "sustained washes of sound rather than a tempestuous, melodramatic or operatic style of scoring."
Mancini responded with a score that is launched by brief, jarring chords over the studio logo, followed by a percussive melodic pattern overlying a strong bossa nova beat that pulses through the title sequence until the explosion. The "washes of sound" continue throughout, always rhythmic and often as purposefully unpleasant as the visuals. The one lyrical theme is "Pianola," piano roll music played in Tanya’s brothel, which leavens the few scenes that lend Quinlan a hint of humanity.
Welles insisted that the incidental music "should sound as bad" as it would in reality. Toward this end, music supposedly heard over outside speakers or in the motel was deliberately degraded by re-recording it from cheap playback units under similar conditions. Welles enjoyed bombarding his audiences with unpleasant sounds, which he often did in his Mercury Theatre radio broadcasts. (This writer, a former theater man, remembers customers complaining about the screeching bird in Citizen Kane, and the cracked record and persistently beeping telegraph in Journey into Fear.)
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