He particularly wanted to change the whole music at the beginning of Touch of Evil, which had a title sequence, and a Henry Mancini score. It's kind of a famous score. Welles didn't want this. He wanted no titles at the beginning. And he wanted the characters of Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh to be discovered walking through this border town in a famous travelling shot that lasts three minutes and 12 seconds, or something, and ends with them crossing the border from Mexico into the United States.
And then, the car that we have also been tracking, also goes through immigration. And then, blows up on the other side because we know a bomb has been planted in it. The significant difference, I think, in Welles's mind, reading into the memo, is that if we know a bomb is in the trunk of the car, and we know this is a title sequence, and the music says: this is a title sequence, we know the bomb is not going to explode until the title sequence is over. Whereas, if the music is a piecemeal construction of various source music, the music from a night club, the music from a record shop, the music from a passing bandalero, you know, just this kind of out-of-focus pools of sound that go with the pools of light that the camera is moving through that we can't predict when, really, when the bomb is going to explode. And there's a moment where the car passes very close to Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston. The car itself has a radio in it that's playing music. And so we know that's the car that has the bomb in it. Maybe it's going to explode right now. So anyway, it adds a layer of tension to the opening three minutes that is missing in the original construction, as the studio had it.
