Original subtitles

This is Alan Barron, and speaking about the experience of making this film, 40

years ago.

You could take the track down a little bit.

I started the film, frankly, with 50 minutes of raw stock and a 35mm air

flex that I rescued from the owner from a shoot I worked on in Castro's Cuba.

That's a long story in itself.

That's how we got the loan of the camera to make the film, when I rescued it.

The plan was, let me start that again.

I started the film with 15 minutes of raw stock and about a 35mm air flex.

Again, I started the film with 15 minutes of raw stock and a 35mm air flex

I rescued from the owner, for the owner, from a shoot I worked on in Castro's

Cuba. That's how we got the loan of the camera to make the film. The plan was to

shoot the 15 minutes of stock and then use this to attract money to shoot the

entire script.

I'd planned on getting an actor I knew to play the lead part of Bono, the

killer. As fate would have it, the actor suddenly got a part in another film

that would actually pay him money. A dirty word to us.

So my friend, producer, suggested I play the character.

Until then, the thought never occurred to me.

So I agreed, providing I pass a screen test, which happened to be the opening

scene to Grand Central Station, now gone.

When I saw the theme, with apprehension, I jokingly said of my own performance,

I think the kid can do it.

So with the Aeroflex and my producer, we simply walked into Grand Central

Station and shot the opening scenes of the film.

The idea for the opening tunnel shot occurred to me while standing in the

car of a train moving through the tunnel to New Jersey, where we shot the

exiting...

The train scene. We picked that station because it was above the ground and we

could use natural light.

With the footage we raised an additional $18 ,000.

Now began what was then labeled guerrilla shooting.

Stealing shots without permission.

I should add.

The help of a good man at Camera Equipment Company who rented us

spec and some additional lying to the lab about our money will allow us to

develop our footage provided we gave them the future print order.

Which Universal honored when they bought the U .S. Raiders?

The scene in the bedroom of the Ratty Hotel that Frankie Bono first checked

since he was shot in the apartment.

The scene in the bedroom of the Ratty Hotel that Frankie Bono first checked

since he was shot in the...

in the apartment of a bedroom of a friend. The prairie scenes, like most

everything in the film, we just shot boldly with no permits.

We ran into many obstacles, which I will relate as the scenes unfold.

The night scenes in New York were shot from an old VW bus, and I had to

the photographer to open up the aperture all the way and hope... to capture the

scenes with the then -new Fast Raw stock that Kodak had developed and who we

conned a free 400 -foot load to test.

That test was the Grand Central scene, which, of course, we used.

We had some funny experiences with the police.

We were shooting on the street in front of the Brownstone, which I'll come to.

Anyway, this hotel scene was really the bedroom of a friend.

By the name of it, if you need anything, just ask for George.

Okay.

The subsequent shots that were done there were done in other locations. But

initially, the shot you're seeing was there.

Walking to the ferry was done from our bus.

And we then, on the ferry itself, we found that we had a tripod.

No permissions, of course.

And when the ferry got started, the vibrations were terrible in those old

ferries. So I got the idea of getting three cardboard boxes, shoving the

into the boxes, stuffed with rolled -up newspaper.

And amazingly, it worked like a wonderful vibration baffle.

And the remaining shots on the... Well, it took about...

On the ferry, we must have gone back and forth several times at least to capture

these scenes.

in his eye when

When I did these things, it was very cold and I had a bad sinus condition.

No makeup, but I knew it would work for the character.

So that I looked uglier than ever.

My nose flattened out with the sinus problem and the cold.

And obviously it worked for the scene.

Lionel Snyder, who did the narration, was then a blacklisted actor, and

he made us a deal where for $1 ,000 we could give him a credit, and for

$500 we'll do it with no credit. Well, we took the $500 deal because that's

our pocketbook allowed.

This car was the borrowed car of, I believe, my producer's father -in -law.

And I believe the house we were looking at was somewhere out in Queens.

And this house, and that's where we shot that scene.

Nice little home.

Quiet little community.

An hour out in the suburbs.

Every morning he's picked up by two bodyguards.

Hood written all over them. But when the neighbors read the headlines, mobster

killed, they'll say...

But Mr. Troiano seemed like such a respectable man. He went to work every

morning, 9 .30 on the dot.

You already know one thing. You can't make the killer this house too easily

spotted. 24 -hour street lamps.

The music.

It was done by Meyer Kupferman, and I think helped the film a great deal.

And, of course, these shots were over the shoulder, which, interestingly

when I subsequently worked at Warner Brothers and asked for an Aeroflex to

some over the shoulder, this is in 1960, 61, or 62, I forget.

They hesitated, and I asked them why, and they said, well, that's a toy.

I said, it's a toy I just shot a 100 ,000 -foot film with.

No crew goes out without an Aeroflex or an initial camera.

In those days, it was strictly the old Mitchell cameras, and they were

cumbersome, and they never shot shots like these. So I didn't realize it was a

novelty or doing something historic.

These scenes, of course, I knew so well, having been born and bred in New York

and having driven a taxi in New York.

I dreamed these scenes and these shots, and they... Just came instinctively.

Now you know the pattern the job will take. A waiting job.

Waiting to find where Troiano goes to be alone.

And you know another thing.

He'll have to be quick and silent while he's away from his bodyguards.

It'll be a job for a gun.

That means another pet.

And, of course, taking advantage of a cop we're about to see added to the,

we incorporated that into the narration.

And this is the set.

We built it. It was based on tenements that I was used to. I actually had an

apartment in a place that looked, in a tenement that looked like this. Although

this is a set and the character you're about to see is Larry Tucker.

who never acted before, but at 375 pounds, as you will see, I thought he'd

a wonderful character, which he proved to be.

And the apartment that we go into is also a set done by Charles Rosen, who

subsequently did a lot of very expensive films. But this is his first film. He's

right out of Harvard.

I mean, Yale, forgive me.

And this apartment was inspired. That lamp was out of my own bedroom.

which subsequently you'll see it's used in the film.

And it's Christmas time, and we had that little Christmas tree in there, and the

rats just added atmosphere and proved to be very effective.

We got them from a laboratory, and in

subsequent scenes that you're about to see, Larry...

is eating. And we actually got him a white fish, which it doesn't show in

and white that well. But he had a hard time after doing a few takes of

it. But at the time, we didn't realize there was no smell of vision, so he

didn't smell the white fish.

And this thing proved to be fairly effective.

See,

that thing he's going for is the white fish.

Larry proved to be, subsequently went on to be a producer,

and he worked with Paul, name eludes me for the

moment, director.

I don't think Larry's with us any longer.

Of course, they weren't trained rats, so they didn't respond exactly as we

wanted, but I think it was effective.

I guess the rat did like some whitefish. Yeah, he liked it.

I've got to make something on the deal.

Just another 50.

Come on, Frank, please.

All right.

I'll give you the other 50.

But that's it.

Do you understand?

Sure, sure, Frank.

When I make a deal, it's a deal.

Now another drink, huh?

I'm in a hurry, Ralph. Where do I pick it up?

Oh, the director that Larry Tucker subsequently worked with is Paul

who, of course, did very well as the director.

The girl used to go with the redhead. They started out as a pair of riders

together.

Sally. Yeah. Hey, Frank.

She, uh... She liked me, didn't she?

Yeah, she liked you.

Yeah.

Here's to, uh... Here's to Sally.

Ralph, where do I get the goods?

Oh, yeah. Over on the east side, there's a barge called the Catherine L.

Pier 21.

Ask to speak to Joe Boniface. Tell him Vinnie Centero sent you. Tell him you're

from Cleveland.

He'll deliver the goods.

Where is that near? Between 23rd and 24th Street.

Now, I want this quick.

Oh, yeah.

Anytime after tomorrow, Frank.

All right.

Hey. Well, what's your rush, Frank?

Gotta run, Ralphie.

Now,

uh, fat Ralph, take the money.

And he goes over to that lamp, and he hides it in what used to be an oil

container for that kind of a lamp.

And that was just an inspiration of the moment, and it worked very well.

And that will end the scene as he takes the wad of money and places it into the

lamp.

Our dolly was not a dolly. It was a tripod.

on wheels, portable wheels, which we subsequently used in other scenes, which

I'll describe.

Of course, these scenes were just stolen, just shot and taken. Whatever we

wanted to use, we just did it.

And it was kind of wonderful and exciting to do things of that nature.

Now, these scenes were shot in actual Harlem from a Volkswagen bus from the

window, and mostly we weren't observed until an

officer at an intersection pulled us over.

and said, what are you guys doing?

We're shooting a movie. Oh, no, you're not. You're shooting cops. In those

a lot of investigations with cops in New York.

It was right about at this spot here that it happened. So we pulled over, and

sent for the commander who came down and said, well, and he realized that, well,

there's no law, and this is the Apollo Theater in the background on 125th

in Manhattan, and the commander said, well, there's no law against shooting

a moving vehicle, so...

I said, thank you, and we moved on. But that was one of the many typical

experiences with everything, including the cops and watchmen and so on.

This, I believe, is Greenwich Village.

Yes, this is Greenwich Village of that time.

Just took a spot, shot the scene.

There's the Frankie Bono in the foreground.

The hat and coat, just not wearing a trench coat was a way of being more

naturalistic. Because in those days, if you played that kind of a role, you wore

a trench coat.

And I just figured an ordinary hat and an ordinary coat.

And this is on the street where we shot the actual brownstone.

So these scenes are authentic. The brownstone is across, facing this area.

Of course, a lot of smoking in those days as well, as you can see.

This is Greenwich Village.

Not going to offer today.

Pick him up tomorrow when he leaves the restaurant.

Now it was Christmas time. The reason for the selection of Christmas and the

idea is that I love the contrast vis -a

-vis Christmas spirit and all that stuff and a lonely man in New York and a

killer. A bit melodramatic, but it worked for me.

And this is a scene we stole in Gimbel's department store, which no longer

exists. And as you see here, Somebody's about to block the camera, and one of

the fellows working with us gives him a body block to get him out of the shot of

the camera.

You'll see that in a minute.

Now here's a guy blocking the camera, and he was deliberately blocked out of

So we had a few tricks for all these things. Of course, this actor never got

paid, whoever he was. We shot him through the window, and again back on

streets along Fifth Avenue.

The music was written by Maya Kufferman. We shot these kids singing in an

abandoned church.

We got that nice echo feeling.

And this is Rockefeller Center with that marvelous Christmas tree in the

background. I found that irresistible.

And it was New York of those days.

Not realizing I'd preserved something that's just not there anymore. The

tree is still there. The Rockefeller Center is still there.

But I love the idea of having captured it at a certain time and place and the

grittiness of it.

Speaking of that, one of the things I decided on is to just work in gray days

because we had no money and no atmosphere. And I thought, well, and we

in gray days. So whenever the sun came out, we didn't.

Didn't shoot an exterior scene.

And it proved to be effective because it got that gritty, consistent look.

And here's a scene shot with the lens wide open.

And, of course, pushed in the lab.

And New York just looked this way at Christmas time.

It was just wonderful visuality. And all for the sake of stealing it. This is

Mayfair. at the time.

And they had a double window, an upper and a lower.

And the visual, as you can see, is just marvelous.

And again, this is in another department store with these kinds of window

dressings.

And in the next scene, I'm walking along, and a woman is blocking the

And I knew that this was done M .O .S. Right there, that woman. And I...

Turn to her and I say, don't look this way. This woman here. And she turns

because I say to her, don't stand there or whatever. Oh, I think it's this

woman here. You see her turn her head? It's because I just said, don't look.

There were a lot of improvisations in that stuff.

This is in front of the plaza in New York. This is the famous fountain in

of the plaza on 57th Street and 5th Avenue.

And the top is cut off because I think the window of the Volkswagen was cutting

off the frame.

But there I am walking in front of it in shadow.

This is a restaurant on a Sunday that was not being used and through

or knowing somebody allowed us to use the restaurant.

And so we had this whole set gratis.

And nowadays people pay a lot of money for those kinds of things.

This is a man called Danny Mann.

He wound up in the music business.

I forget who he was the manager for subsequently.

He was also an actor in those days and played the theme.

Anyone, everyone, Pete, you hate the type.

You'd like to push his loud mouth in.

You smile, you're polite, you don't even hear the words.

Yak, yak, yak like a parrot. Then he's reminding you there was a girl.

The irony of using Lionel Stander is that initially I was to do my

narration, but one of the backers decided to push his opinion into the

had a big argument, and he said, he thought we were getting a famous actor.

Well, we didn't even use the actor's credit anyway, and I agreed because...

That seemed the propitious thing to do at the time.

It worked out well.

and finally got myself a job with an advertising agency.

I guess I've been kind of lucky.

Glad to hear it, Petey.

Say, what are you doing tonight?

I mean, Laurie's giving a party, and you're coming.

No, I can't make it, kid. I've got to go.

Waiter. Oh, nonsense. Listen, Frankie, it's Christmas Eve.

Oh, Frankie, you've got to come.

I can't make it. There'll be a lot of real swinging people there.

You'll have a wonderful time.

Besides, here she comes now.

Hey, Laurie, look who's here. This is Molly McCarthy.

You recognize this guy?

Hello, Frankie.

Hello.

You sure have changed.

Why, she has changed a bit. Maybe a little longer, wider, pets all.

Hey, Laurie, we gonna let him have a lonely old beer on Christmas Eve? You

you're making a mistake, but you tell yourself maybe it's smarter to play it

cool. Go for one drink, stay for a dance maybe, then get out.

You tell yourself they might get suspicious if you turn down the invite.

Maybe you're right, maybe you're smart.

Maybe you're kidding yourself, so watch it.

Now this was a set in that same little studio called the New York Studios at

time. Very small, the whole... The width of the studio was about 21 feet, I seem

to recall.

And this is a set that Charles Rosen put together.

And these are just people we got who I'm sure we didn't pay them. We didn't have

any money. They just were glad to be in the film, which is kind of a novelty in

those days.

And as a matter of fact, Charles Rosen, the set designer, is in one of the

shots.

There's Charles Rosen sitting at the end of the couch. That's the set designer.

We used everybody we could.

Come on, go ahead. We're all friends here. Yeah, go ahead, Frankie. My sister

only asked once, you know.

You're not having a very good time, are you?

I guess I just don't mix in.

going to do so again.

Frankie, I hereby challenge you to another peanut pushing contest with a

Of course, I have a slight advantage.

He has a chance. I've been practicing for years. Come on, Frankie. I'm giving

you a second chance. Very few people get that in their life.

Well,

that was just one of those Mickey Mouse ideas.

You know, you reach for something to make something interesting. And again,

dichotomy of A killer in a peanut race at a party appealed to me. So

once the idea was born, I included it, and

obviously it seems to work.

The absurdity is what appealed to me, and contrast.

Well, the music, I think the actual sound was

written, that was recorded by Meyer Kufferman, and

we laid it in, and all the music was Meyer

Kufferman. The choral music and all that stuff, he did that in that church, and

we did it with a group.

group of musicians. That was one of the really professional things that we

managed to come up with just enough money to get it done.

This is somewhere out, I don't know, in Forest Hills at a church. We just,

whatever spot we could find that would work, we used. This is mid

-Manhattan.

And just set the camera down, picked the doorway, and that was it.

And this is a set.

That same little studio that we've managed to squeeze all this in and put

things up.

Hi.

Hello.

Well, Molly McCarthy had a fairly good reputation as an actress in those days.

I really don't know her credits. It's been so long ago. But she was a working

actress for whatever there was at that period and got to know her. And you see

that door to the right there?

There was nothing there when we shot this scene. But subsequently, when we

wanted to do this other scene, which you will see, we then built a door. But

most people don't realize.

Fortunately, we did have a door shaped there, although there was not a room

there.

And this, of course, speaks for itself.

The dinner scene and the props and so on. We managed to scrape all that

stuff up.

I guess smoking in those days was de rigueur, and I was a big smoker in those

days.

And so I hardly do a scene without a cigarette in my hand, I noticed.

I was doing pretty good until the whole damn thing fell apart.

What do you mean?

There were these local racket guys, and they tried to shake the old man down.

They bombed his house, and they killed his wife.

Why? Why?

You just don't ask questions. He was really just a guy scraping by.

Probably left school at a very early time and lived in an area where

not very different from where I was raised, Brownsville, Brooklyn, where

stealing or boxing was a way to make a buck. And as a matter of fact, where I

come from.

company called Murder Incorporated started where these guys made a living

murdering people. I even used one of their ideas later on in the act scene in

the picture because it happened in one of the murders that was recorded by

characters. So this guy I planted in that sort of an atmosphere so that

up a professional killer, he might as well have wound up in the clothing

business working for a father -in -law if it worked that way.

One thing led to another, one crime after another. The next thing you know,

was suddenly a professional killer because it paid a lot. He would come in

out of town, do his work, and after a while develop very little personal

feelings about it.

And it was just, it was so much a part of what I knew as a child in the area I

came from. Not that everybody was of that nature, but I knew about those

of characters.

And that's what inspired this guy in my writing.

Oh, well, a woman was just an object in those days for

this kind of a guy. And, well, he appreciated her.

taking him home for dinner, well, that was mommy. But then when it came to any

arousal on his part, he just practically raped a woman, you know.

Foreplay was forcing himself on them.

But he's kind of a mixed -up guy, and when she rejects him, he has mixed

feelings about it. So there's a certain amount of humanness in the character,

and it's displayed in the scene.

That's the one area of vulnerability he displays in the whole film, is in this

scene.

Evoked by his relationship with her. She could be a little bit of, first a

sexual object, could be mommy, could be his sister.

And he's confused.

Oh, not that much. I did some summer stock. I did a couple of seasons of

stock. I studied under Morris Konofsky, the method acting thing.

And frankly,

I knew at a certain point directing was what I wanted to do.

And acting in this was purely, I don't know if I mentioned that, but...

The reason I played the role was because we offered it to a then working actor

of much more experience, and he turned it down at the last minute because he

a job that actually paid him money, something we never had.

So my then producer said, well, why don't you play it? And I really was very

hesitant about it, and I said, I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll screen test

me, and if...

I like what I see.

I'll do it. Well, we got this 400 -load of test film from Kodak.

And we used that test film, of course, and we shot the scenes in Grand Central

and the phone booth and so on. That proved to be my screen test. And then

saw it, I seriously looked at it and I thought, well, and jokingly said, well,

think the kid can do it.

So I wound up playing the part. It was never my intention to play it. It turns

out it was a good thing because the things I did, I probably couldn't have

an actor to do, like jumping in a river subsequently and a lot of the...

running down off of a roof on fire escapes and so on.

So fate moves in strange ways, as I say in the film, and that's the way I wound

up acting in this film. And I subsequently was offered some acting

I regret now I didn't take them.

Warner Brothers wanted me to act and direct in a television show, but I

was put under contract at Fox, and I never did do any acting again.

If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have pursued it.

It started at the end of 1959, and since there was a

money -raising thing and all that sort of thing, we probably started the... end

of 59, right into early 60, I would say, and spread over a

period of at least a couple of months, although we didn't work constantly. We

just worked when we can, and we probably had it edited and cut sometime in, I

guess, sometime in the early 60s, I would guess.

As a matter of fact, yes, that's the reason it was late for Cannes.

Because it was submitted to Cannes by somebody who knew more than I did.

And it got there, according to Favre Le Bré, the then head of Cannes,

regretfully, a letter that I had stating that...

We would have loved to have had it and caused this big controversy because at

Cannes, I read in Variety, it got a lot of conversation.

And one of the conversations was some of the people felt I had copied Jean -Luc

Godard, who I didn't... It's a name I'd never heard before, nor did I have seen

his films until about two years after I made this picture. I finally saw

Breathless, and I realized why they made the comparison.

But no, I...

German newspaper interviewed me subsequently.

And in German, they used the word terrible for devil.

The lead article said, who the devil is Godard? And it was a big joke for the

Germans, of course, because I said that's the truth. At that time, I had no

who he was.

Anyway, this is the village gate.

It's in Greenwich Village.

This guy was a guy we picked up. He was a friend of Larry Tucker, who I think

was managing him, as a matter of fact, the fat guy.

And these were people we...

picked up to play the role. He was an actor. I can't remember his name at the

moment.

These two people, I remember they were high school teachers, these two men. For

some reason, that stuck in my mind.

And now this dolly scene was done on a tripod on portable wheels with a

hundred -pack pound of flour or sugar to give it weight. And we did this nice

dolly shot with that equipment and did this scene.

And the girl in the foreground was my youngest sister. I used my family

I could. All my three sisters were in it. This is my other sister in a bar

about a month later in Brooklyn.

There was no such bar in this club.

But we cut this together with the rest of the scene. And then there were scenes

where this POV, of course, was shot a month earlier.

That man was an actual bartender who worked there.

This, again, is in that Brooklyn bar scene.

We originally used a song in this, Happy Birthday to You, and we found out that,

oh, see this shot? I was just on a bar stool, knowing that I'm subsequently

going to shoot a bar somewhere.

This isn't an actual bar.

And I started to say, there's a scene where these people sing Happy Birthday,

and we had to then re -dub it with He's a Jolly Good Fellow because...

Apparently some people went and captured the rights to that, and we were not

going to pay royalties for something like this. It happens in the scene.

And you have Charlie Goodfellow. Well, we dubbed that over

Happy Birthday to You in order to escape that royalty fine.

The musicians in the background were an actual little group that we had picked

up.

For this scene.

Oh, yes. It was part of... Yeah, the village was a common place to go. There

all kinds of wonderful clubs and people starting out.

And there's a wonderful Spanish club I used to love to go to. And all these...

Other clubs were just starting out before the Café Noir and who and all

places began.

And this club, I think it's still there. It's changed. The Village Gate became

quite famous. It was in a cellar of one of those hotels that

the homeless, those cheap dollar a night hotels, but the cellar was turned into

this club.

I love the atmosphere, you know, the dirty brick and all that stuff.

This again, that's my sister on the left, my older sister, and my brother

-law sitting there on the left.

And again, I intercut this scene that was shot sometime later with the scene

you're about to see, where he's now walking in the club, going into the

bathroom.

Now, in the bathroom, we shot in the actual men's room.

The owner was getting nervous because he had to open up.

So we had to work real fast.

Got these shots in, and finally there's a two -shot,

an over -the -shoulder shot between me and Larry Tucker.

And as you will see, I then had to sacrifice my own close -up in the over

-shoulder because it was time to get out.

So we had to live with what we had to live with.

It's in this scene here.

And now I have this angle.

And I never could come around and get the over -the -shoulder of Larry Tucker

me.

You see, I had to live with this angle, which would be my master shot.

But it worked out fine.

It's interesting how, looking at it, I remember every moment of actually

shooting it.

If I recall, in this scene, Larry and I worked the

dialogue over, you know, while we were setting up and so on.

So we refined things as we went along here and there.

I wish I had that hair today, but I'll settle for what I've got.

Why don't you go home and feed your rats?

Fine, Frank.

I'll go home.

But if I just happen to read in the newspaper that our friend out there

having no more birthday parties, will you come by and see old Ralph?

I figure you can owe him a few bucks or something.

You're over your head, fatty.

Of course, having to work as fast as we did,

the singing, and him being never having been on camera before, was a bit

nervous, but we settled for what we could get.

I guess it all led to the common grittiness of it all.

This is Maya Kuffman's wonderful score. I love what he did.

I worked with him.

We had a movie, Ola.

And we discussed a lot of things.

He asked for some suggestions, which I was happy that he took.

And others were purely his creation. It was very nice.

This is all in Greenwich Village, all this following stuff.

You know, going back, one thing was well known.

They didn't use the word gay then, but it was homosexuals. That was just one

part of it, but that was lesbians and homosexuals. But they were a minor part

the population.

But it had a notorious cut to it because of that. The Village Barn was one of

the clubs, as we're passing now.

Artists in those days when it was cheap enough. So that painters and artistic

poets.

Greenberg was just in the coffee houses and all those early days of a lot of

the famous painters, I think Rauschenberg and all of those people who

nobody then as far as their notoriety.

But it had a certain intrigue because of all these things.

Of course, now it's too expensive for any artist who moved on to other places.

But then it was an artist colony of a sort with all kinds of people. It was

apart from the rest of the city in a sense. This is a set, again, that we saw

earlier.

And the idea for this, you see this axe and fire pail. Well, they did have that

in the early days in the tenement.

And I got this idea because it was a way one of the characters in actual life in

Murder Incorporated was out to kill a man. And he went to a theater and the

sat down and the killer went to that exact thing, picked up the axe and was

about to let him have it when he moved.

But the idea for it came from that actual attempted murder. So that's how I

it here in the film.

So my background did play a role.

Now this fight, we really went at each other.

I think I was sore for a week after pushing around a 375 -pound man. And he

too. We really went at him.

and took the various angles, and as you can see, there were no doubles here.

This was all set up, and we went as strong as we could without actually

each other, knocking over the furniture and so on. It all worked to advantage,

and of course, the lamp, that wonderful lamp with all that money in it, I used

it to kill him, and I strangled him with the cord. Then I got the idea of using

a handheld camera, which we weren't using those days.

where I got the nice feeling of his dizziness when he got up, and that was

deliberate, to get the effect of the motion of the camera, which we'll see

shortly.

And that proved to be very effective.

Here, I believe the handheld camera may have started about here, and there's a

shakiness that should come up soon.

Anyway, this was handheld, and not that common in those days.

Here, you see, this was very deliberate, and I liked the idea because it was the

way he was feeling, and you saw that blurred look of what was lying on the

and so on.

I may have. I can't. I mean, I know the title and so on.

I can't recall offhand whether I had or not.

Who was in The Touch of Evil?

Oh, yes, I did see it. But I don't know if it influenced me. I may have. Yeah, I

love that opening. That's the famous opening shot in Venice.

Yeah, that teacher. Oh, see this thing here?

Now, this was done with two of us, just the cameraman and me. We got up at 5 o

'clock in the morning. This was Park Avenue in those days. And this is a hill

because I once lived near there.

And I love this view of looking up this hill and this figure starting small and

walking toward the camera.

And as you can see, the lights are still on.

And when Maya was doing the music.

And he said, what would you like here? And I said, I'd love a timpani,

maybe a bass drum just going. And he did exactly that. And he did the music plus

that wonderful building beat that you feel.

It proved to be very effective. It was just a shot that I used to wander around

New York and visualize things.

Never dreaming I was going to use them in a film, but they just look good to

as this shot does.

Now, this wasn't the original... Well,

it may have been the original bedroom. Yeah, it looks like it was because we

used so many places to complete all these scenes.

You know you'll stay in a sweat till they find the body and the news breaks.

I have a feeling this might have been just a set, a wall and a curtain and a

bed, because we couldn't get back into the original place where we shot the

opening scene.

Yeah, it probably was just that. And this hotel existed downtown Manhattan,

far from where Lincoln gave his very famous speech.

Use that wonderful cheap hotel. This is on 34th Street and Third

Avenue.

And this is the East River.

I think this is part of my test, by the way, this footage.

Part of that wonderful 400 -foot load that we got from Kodak.

I remembered, yes, you can see the coat is kind of new.

We didn't waste anything.

I'm sure we didn't pay for this front of this drugstore.

This also, I believe, was part of the test because we shot in Grand Central

Station in that phone booth.

And this is all part of the...

Stuff that I had to look at and see if I was qualified to play it.

And those wonderful old dial telephones with the coin boxes.

Yeah?

This is Cleveland.

Hello, Cleveland.

Listen, I got to talk to you.

Talk?

I mean, not on the phone. I want to meet with you.

Would you take care of everything?

No. What I'm trying to tell you is there's been some trouble.

Did you see the papers?

How did you get into that?

I couldn't help it. He was trying to shake me down. All right.

Were you spotted?

No, but what I want to tell you... I ain't interested in the details.

But listen, let me tell you... I told you I ain't interested.

I got no time to play with.

We're only interested in one thing.

You getting that job done.

What I want to tell you is I don't want to do the job.

Oh, because he didn't intend to kill Fat Ralph.

And the notoriety, what I'm implying is that the notoriety was making him very

nervous because already he's got a murder that he didn't plan on doing. The

planned murder he sort of handles very professionally, but he didn't mean to do

something where he could have been discovered. He would have considered

very amateurish.

kill a guy on the spot for the reasons that he did and so on.

And he now has regrets about it because it had all the notoriety. It was in the

newspapers and he just got nervous about the whole thing. He's not all that

together.

He's a very mixed up fellow.

Yeah, I love it.

Now, this was done on an improvised set, just a wall, an improvised bed and a

pillow. It's supposed to be in that same bedroom, which it wasn't. But when we

had to do the scene at a subsequent time, that's what we did.

And part of that confusion is, again, what he does in this scene here. He

to see her.

Whatever.

It was left of his human feelings of his childhood or where he had a mother of

any kind and any feelings. And he's taken a liking to her and he knew her in

reform school, not a reform school, but an orphanage when he was a child. And it

touches certain feelings in him.

Although she doesn't feel the same way about his situation.

She's being kind and he's being romantic.

Or whatever it is that he's feeling that's emotional.

Well,

we worked with a movieola.

I envy the people that work with the stuff they work with today where they

you know, those marvelous flatbeds and the equipment you have today.

But a moviola, as you know, is pretty crude, but that's what the industry used

for a long time, and we used.

And we had several people. I forget, there was a, I don't know if she was in

the credits. We had a woman editor.

She's a very good editor for a while.

my partner and me and we sort of I forget

Peggy Lawson as a matter of fact she worked on for a while I don't know if we

have her in the credits this is along the waterfront and

near the fish market it's not as dramatic these days as it was

then and this now is gone but it was a wonderful setting, you know, all

this material and this

barge that he comes across. Now, this is an interesting thing.

We didn't have any permission to shoot here.

And we have a camera set up and we're shooting this scene and a watchman comes

along.

And he said, oh, you guys can't be there. So I told the fellas working with

I said, keep him busy while we shoot this scene. And I hear them in the

background arguing with him and they're stalling him and he's going to call the

cops and so on. I played the scene with all that happening in the background.

And I remember it distinctly. And we played it long enough to get the

completed scene done.

And subsequently, when Universal bought the film, this barge company, because we

stupidly used the actual name of this barge in buying a gun, and the people

owned the barge started a lawsuit with Universal, which I believe Universal

settled for something like $1 ,200 or $1 ,500 when they released the film.

But that was part of the game we played. Had this wonderful stuff with a

watchman in the background saying, get lost.

And I played the scene no matter what.

If there was an earthquake, I'd have played that scene right through.

And I love that gray look. And that's the look I wanted for the whole film.

it was very effective.

This is a house, an actual house. I think it's 32nd or 33rd Street on the

side of Manhattan.

I went

back

to do a documentary about... eight or nine years ago, and this hallway was

exactly as it was.

And perhaps it'll be in the documentary that might be included in this disc.

And it was kind of interesting.

We shot these scenes in spite of the fact that nobody was restricted from

the staircase.

It wasn't a very busy hallway, but any time somebody had to... You see that

we're passing? I learned that in the old days...

those crevices in the hallways were done so that when a casket was brought down

the hallway, it could make the turn.

I thought it was there for some statue, but that was that hallway.

And you see, there it is again, that little niche.

That's my art director friend told me.

No, we shot day for day and night for night.

I don't think we ever had a filter shot in the whole film.

Oh, we had color trans in those days. That's what they called them.

They were small lights, and they gave an effective amount of light to do just

what we're doing here.

That was it, you know, so I don't know how much, you know, minimum of juice,

we worked out of, we didn't, I don't think we had a Jenny, so I think we

out of batteries and on the house current probably we may have plugged in.

This is the actual roof of that house.

When I went back to do the documentary about 89 years ago, I shot here and that

building that we're looking at was gone. The roof was still there.

This is them exiting that same house. There's a gate in front of that house

and the building alongside it no longer exists.

See, that brittle grayness works so beautifully because it's consistent

the film, and it really gives it a texture and a tone, which is what I

consciously wanted right from the beginning.

And this I knew from my neighborhood was called a Lloyd.

In those days, with the kind of locks that existed, with a piece of

you could trip a lock.

That's long been rectified by most locks.

But the abbreviation was using a Lloyd.

And these are just the simple little Colortran lights that we had.

It was about as technical as we got. We actually turned a light on, and it's

about as much as we could do, and it was very effective.

Well, what's wonderful is that we...

photographer, and we weren't about him walking in this dark stuff.

But then we got to Hollywood, it was, God, they were terrified of a dark spot.

And here it's so effective, you know, when you're doing this kind of a film, a

film wise, it subsequently became described.

And so we were an early film noir, an expression

I didn't know when I did the film.

You know, that's a hard thing to say.

Not a lot, I'll tell you. We worked pretty fast.

But I couldn't be accurate now. It's too long ago for me to remember. But I

would say, oh, I know we did it in less than 30 days, if I had to put it.

I'm sure of that.

I would say maybe, if I had to guess, 25 to 30 days of shooting tops,

all together, with even the...

walking shots and the city shots and so on. That's my guess.

But it was spread out because of either money or weather or getting people and

that sort of thing.

So even though it was spread over a period of perhaps two and a half months,

well that's including, or three months, I think from the time we shot to the

time we finished, must have been

Three months, no, certainly not four months because of the Cannes Festival,

which is in May.

And if we started toward the end of 59 and were ready for the, almost ready for

the Cannes Festival, which we only learned about at the last minute.

So I would say that's the period it took to shoot the film.

This scene was done, not in the bedroom, which is implied, but it was done.

I think we just did it on the couch in the office.

And again, Maya Kufferman did this wonderful, wrote this wonderful trumpet

solo that goes on behind it, which I love.

And again, I think helped the film a great deal.

The gun, I think we rented from a rental place, very professionally.

Silencer is something they furnished us with.

I later learned that when the film played in Chicago, the Chicago

loved it.

They felt very expressed by it. I recently ran into a film buff

when he learned that I had done this film.

told me all this. And I know it got very nice reviews in Chicago at the time.

It amused me because, well, I mean, it's all fiction, of course, but...

No, not

at all. We just shot it for film, and the aspect was for film at that time.

Not at all. We gave television no thought whatsoever.

This was 1960, and it's quite amazing what the thinking was then

as opposed to what the thinking is today, you know?

No, we didn't screen it to allow the television aspect

in. What was the ratio then? I forget.

I can't remember the exact.

But it was shot for what was the acceptable aspect in those days.

Nothing can go wrong. No mistakes.

You know, I don't remember what was lost because of the

size. I really don't remember.

I remember I saw it once years ago, Warner Brothers.

It was not one, but Universal released it, cut a lot of the film out, anything

that was suggested violence.

And I don't remember any feelings of having lost anything for some strange

reason. They must have had to squeeze it a bit.

So I don't remember.

They released it, I recall, because I remember calling Larry Tucker up and I

wondered if you'd seen it. I want to say something about this scene and I'll go

back to what we're talking about.

This was a scene outside of an office I had in the Film Center building in New

York. And looking out the window, I noticed the children, when they would

would get into line and form, as you will see shortly, a swastika.

I thought, how marvelous. It was just such a strange illusion.

And I thought it worked perfectly since this guy was from an orphanage to use

that footage.

So I shot it right out the window.

And then I knew what was about to happen with regard to the way they exit.

And I play that as if he had seen the swastika.

And it was so interesting purely because I noticed it and I thought I'd use it.

And then also he, in the narration as you hear, we imply a somewhat Catholic

background in an orphanage and so on. I thought that worked with it and used it.

Now this is the original room.

We shot this all in that one afternoon or day.

the pickups we did in other places.

It was probably very early in the shooting of the film.

Now, you see, there's a right here, there's a door.

And since that wasn't originally an actual room, we had to work this out

and put a room in there.

I'm not sure what we're about to see, but I know that was something we had to

deal with because there's a character that emerges in there that turns out to

her actual lover.

Frank, I'm sorry. Laurie, sweetheart, have you got one?

Ah, see, that was a technical thing there where the door's wide open. But it

really what we didn't do was swing a door, so I suppose it was not as serious

I thought. But I do remember that we had to work in a little scene there with

him standing there.

By the way, that man in the door was Carol Burnett's husband at the time.

suffered a divorce.

His name was Don Saroyan.

And a very nice man.

And he was in the earlier scene in the party.

Merry Christmas.

And he played this character here.

Watch it, Frankie. Danger signals.

Like electric current. Like lightning. Like fire in the night and sirens

screaming in your head.

Don't think.

Don't remember.

Don't look ahead.

Concentrate. You have a job to do and you're an expert.

A killer who doesn't kill gets killed.

Here's that hallway again.

I love, see that little thing in the, that thing we're looking at in the wall?

That's the coffin turn.

And the idea for this, I just love the, again, the dichotomy of a teddy bear and

a murder.

The contrast, I just knew would work for me.

I separately used something like this when I did a television show at

years later.

Of course, here.

And now the nice cutting of the rapid cutting back and forth work was

And poor little teddy bear lying there.

It was great. The contrast worked. And, of course, the blood, the black and

white was...

Chocolate, hopefully it tasted well to the actor.

Were you, oh yeah, being by other people?

In the industry, you mean?

As far as I knew, yeah, I have a feeling it was a trick that we knew about.

And Chris had photographed so well. It had the consistency of blood, you know,

and in black and white, it was great. And that's what he, when you see that in

his mouth, that's what it was. It was chocolate.

Which you couldn't do today, of course.

When I did the documentary about ten years ago, or nine years ago, I remember

getting out of this thing, and I did the exact thing instinctively of clapping

my hands together to wipe the dust off of them for the documentary.

This scene I shot after coming up a bad head cold

in New York. That might have been one of the reasons we even stopped on

occasion. Running down these steps in the winter,

a bit dizzy from just getting out of bed from being sick.

But then again, there was nothing that was going to stop us.

Oh, what you just saw?

Well, no, you could see the cuts that you just saw.

But there was one, you know, running down the stairs, the fire escape was one

set up.

There were a couple of cuts that you just saw, like just now. You know, there

were... I'd say this whole sequence is at least a half a dozen cuts.

And this is the actual gate leading to the cellar.

And I remember

this woman was a dancer. You can tell from the way she walks. She was a ballet

dancer.

And that was the girlfriend of Triana, the character.

And I remember it was a very

gray day, like it was typical of what I wanted.

And a little while later, as he gets into his car, there's some snowflakes,

which I don't know if they show on film, but I love the idea of it snowing.

As you can see, there was no snow. This was seen in front of the film center

building, and that was a friend of mine playing the nun. Would you believe that

people couldn't stop people from putting money into her box?

We picked up about, I don't know, $3 or $4 in tips, and I jokingly said, for the

next film, that might be one of the ways to raise the money.

I mean, she just sat there posing.

people, we just couldn't, we didn't want to stop shooting by telling somebody,

no, there's a movie, and they just came by and dropped money in her lap.

Now we go out to the, well, right after this phone call. This is again a shot

with my famous screen test.

You can see the cloth on the coat. It's pretty new now that I've told you.

And we didn't waste anything.

We couldn't afford to.

Those images walking by are people in Grand Central.

In reflection.

Now, this is the area facing Jamaica Bay on the way to Kennedy Airport, which

most of the viewers thought was New Jersey. And the bulrushes in the

And it was a day we waited for because the original day when I showed up was

sunny. We waited 10 days for a day like this. We left the original day, went

back here. And those buildings existed when I was a boy. It was, I guess, a

fishing village.

And this is what was left of it.

And as a boy, there were many more of them, and I remembered it, and I thought

of it as a wonderful place for this scene, as it turned out to be.

And, of course, the day that it happened, we just wanted inclement

we wound up with this snowstorm and this wind, and it was wonderful, and we paid

off waiting.

And one of the actors that we needed for the scene,

we couldn't get him because we did it in such a last minute.

And I said, let's go anyway.

And then in one of the cuts, I'm actually me chasing me.

I play one of the other characters in one of the long shots running after me.

As a boy, I used to come here and steal brass from the ways from the old ship.

launching pads.

And this is what was left of it, and it was wonderful.

These abandoned houses and the wood and so on.

Just great atmosphere.

It was called the Old Mill at that time.

Why it was called that, I don't know, but that's what we called it as kids.

And this is what was left of it. It's long gone. When I was there recently,

bulrushes are there and the bears there.

All this woodwork and ships and boats and what have you

are gone.

Now, in one of these cuts, I'll show you, it's actually me chasing

me.

See, there's one guy.

Now, these are the actual characters, but I believe there's another.

Gee, I even fooled myself. I can't remember the cut, but I know that I

one of the other characters.

Now here, this is a one -take shot because I had a shot of Brandy. It was

wintertime, and I dived in and went for broke.

This is an IMO camera in one angle, this angle, and the dive -in was with the

Aeroflex.

And that's how we got this shot.

God moves in mysterious ways, they said.

Maybe he is on your side the way it all worked out.

Remembering other Christmases, wishing for something, something important,

something special.

And this is it, baby boy, Frankie Bono.

You're alone now.

Well, I would like to sum it up with something 40 odd years later that occurs

to me, is that every now and then when something is beautifully expressed,

almost invariably it's because one mind had control over it and expressed

themselves, for good or for bad, but you can feel that. It's an unwritten rule

that I feel very strongly about.