Orson Welles encouraged Dennis Weaver to improvise his role as the strange hotel manager, and together they created a unique character that ran counter to Weaver's role on Gunsmoke (1955). Welles later described the part as a "Shakespearean loony." According to Weaver in Barbara Leaming's bio of Welles, "We went into his whole background--about his mother and how he was a mamma's boy. He had this terrible guilt about sex and yet he had a large sex drive. There were no words to indicate such a thing in the script at all, but it gave him an interesting behavior pattern when we put it all together. The main thing was his attraction to women and his fear of them at the same time. That was the thing that was basic to his character."

Film

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