The Independent runs a nice appreciation of Mercedes McCambridge, by David Thomson. The cinetrix is even more terrified by her turn in Touch of Evil after reading this.
One day, in LA, Welles (who was an old friend of Mercy) called her and asked her to come to the studio. She arrived and saw the set: a motel room, with Janet Leigh in her underwear in bed and a gang of lecherous hoodlums. All it needed was a catalyst: Orson cut her hair and then rubbed black boot polish in to kill the lighter brown."They brought a black leather jacket from somewhere, and I was 'ready'. Orson said he wanted a heavy, coarse Mexican accent. I said 'You've got it.' He asked me to walk across the studio like a tough masculine hood-type broad. I said, 'You've got it.' And I did it. He said in a statement terse and unadorned, that he wanted me to burst into Janet Leigh's motel room with all the other hoodlums. As their ringleader I was to give them the go-ahead to have their group pleasure with her, and I was to say in a gruff accent that I would hang around and watch." Touch of Evil still contains one of the most lurid and frightening rape scenes ever shot. It was an afternoon's work; it was stylised and camp, it was over the top; yet McCambridge had a natural grasp of horror that made the scene so mysterious that it got past the censor. I don't think the people ready to ban such a thing ever understood all she was implying.
Here's how Thomson began in his entry on McCambridge in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film.
I don't know whether it is a matter of good luck, or bad luck, but there are people one sometimes meets in real life who have a smell of danger about them. Sometimes they are self-destructive, but that's not necessarily really an answer to the matter. Are there really people who have been picked out by God, or fate, as the recipients of special, remarkable, hideous burdens of misfortune? Or is it in some way their fault, or in their nature--a response to a kind of recklessness that keeps them off balance? Or is all of this just one aghast way of trying to rationalize misfortune?Of the people in this book that I have met, Nicholas Ray had something of that quality. Among the others, who can fail to be moved by (yet terrified of) the bare facts of being Mercedes McCambridge?
