Authors: Patrick McGilligan
The vapid young man and woman of Hamilton’s play were transformed into Kenneth (Douglas Dick) and Janet (Joan Chandler), who arrive for Brandon’s party separately but with closely intertwined backstories. Former lovers, Kenneth is another old school chum, and Janet is a health and beauty columnist—both ultimately reveal themselves as characters of substance. Brandon has invited them to the soiree in another manifestation of his “warped sense of humor,” in Janet’s words. And Hitchcock has invited them into the film—Brandon boasts that he broke up with Janet
before
Kenneth (a hint to moviegoers, already attuned to the swirling subtext, that Brandon may be bisexual)—to deepen the cross-tensions.
Even the dead man was subtly made over by Hitchcock. David Kentley is never glimpsed in the stage play, but Hitchcock insisted, over Laurents’s heated protests, on strangling the character in the opening shots, so the audience would squirm uncomfortably with the recollection of the killing. For the film, David Kentley becomes Americanized as a Harvard graduate, and dialogue that emphasized his only-child status would heighten sympathy for his parents.
The French manservant was dropped in favor of one of Hitchcock’s beloved “old maids”: an actual maid, Mrs. Wilson, played to mousy perfection by Edith Evanson. Mrs. Wilson harbors a crush on Rupert, natters on about pâté, and prods along the suspense by wondering aloud why
Brandon would spontaneously decide to bring the food into the parlor and set the table on large trunk ringed with candles, as if it were a “ceremonial altar.”
Her character helped Hitchcock open up the play, which had only a single drawing-room set. The film, too, was basically one set, but Hitchcock created depth of field by adding an adjacent dining room and kitchen. In one remarkable scene, which comes after everyone has eaten, Hitchcock stands his camera close by the trunk (where the victim’s corpse is hidden) while keeping his lens fixed on Mrs. Wilson as she clears the food and dishes. The housemaid removes the objects one by one, sweeping in and out through a series of open doorways leading to the other rooms. The audience watches and watches, waiting for her to finish clearing the table—and then, finally, to lift the lid and discover the body. No one else is even in the protracted shot; only Rupert’s shoulder is glimpsed, and only chatter is heard.
*
If Rupert’s character didn’t change drastically from the play, Hitchcock’s film does take the crucial step of making him the former housemaster of all four young men—David, Kenneth, Phillip, Brandon—and thus, effectively, their surrogate father. It is Rupert who remembers that Brandon had a “chest complex” as a boy, a weakness for bones in bloody chests in his fireside stories; it’s Rupert’s suspicious scrutiny that reduces the swaggering Brandon to stuttering guilt; and it’s Rupert who offers the film’s thoughtful, Hitchcockian articulation of goodness (“an obligation to the society we live in”) and evil (“something deep inside you from the very start”).
Long after
Rope
and
Under Capricorn
—the two films he chose to shoot in maximum-length takes—Hitchcock was at a loss to explain what had come over him. The technique was an attention-getting “stunt,” he admitted once. “I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it,” he said.
Was he trying to prove something to himself, or to Hollywood? Was he trying to prove to the American film industry that such a thing even could be done—a bravura gesture of artistic commitment, in defiance of the machine-line production system? Were the long, uninterrupted takes intended to maximize his control over the final film, deflating his actors and curtailing any producer interference? Or was the technique mainly his way of distracting journalists and censorship from subject matter as daring and provocative as anything he had done?
A complete reel in those days ran approximately 950 feet, or for
roughly nine and a half minutes. Patrick Hamilton’s original play ran one hour and thirty minutes; the film was timed for less than nine reels, or about eighty minutes.
To make the challenge even harder,
Rope
was slated to be a Technicolor production. Hitchcock had long hoped to make his color debut with a remake of
The Lodger
(with red blood dripping on white flower petals, he often told interviewers), but that ambition had eluded him. Now he would take the occasion of the first Transatlantic production to make his first color film. As would be characteristic of him throughout the rest of his career, he chose a generally subdued palette. He set about planning light and hues—inside and outside the apartment—that would gradually darken to build the tension.
He borrowed cameraman Joseph Valentine from Skirball Productions, and editor William Ziegler from Warner Bros. But the actual “cutting” of
Rope
, the first of three Hitchcock films edited by Ziegler, was closely determined in advance by the director, according to official studio publicity. The only genuine cuts were dictated by the length of a film reel, with the breaks between reels usually disguised by an actor passing in front of the camera just as the footage ended. (Ziegler, according to publicity, helped plan the action by removing the roof from his daughter’s dollhouse, rearranging the rooms to approximate the set, and then moving chess pieces around as stand-ins for the actors.)
On a Warner Bros. soundstage, Hitchcock had a special floor built a few inches above the permanent floor and lined with felt. This became the floor of art director Perry Ferguson’s New York penthouse apartment, consisting of kitchen, dining room, hallway, and living room—with collapsible walls hanging on overhead tracks that could be slid aside to allow the camera to follow the actors through doors. Outside the living-room window hung a reproduction of the New York skyline, complete with miniaturized buildings and clouds of spun glass hung on wires, to be moved between reels to simulate a shifting sky. The film starts in daylight and ends at nightfall; the incremental shadowing of the sky, with stars, lights, and neon signs twinkling on, would coincide with the action.
To inaugurate the first Transatlantic production—and belatedly celebrate the Hitchcocks’ birthdays—Pat Hitchcock joined Arthur Laurents and Whitfield Cook in organizing a party at Bellagio Road on December 6. Besides Sidney Bernstein and his wife, the guests included the John Hodiaks, Ingrid Bergman, and Cary Grant. Rehearsals were about to begin for
Rope
; filming was scheduled to commence on January 12, 1948.
Sidney Gilliat once recalled the glow on Hitchcock’s face upon the first release of
The Lady Vanishes
in England, at the sight of a marquee with his name floating above the title. After ten years in Hollywood, he finally re-claimed
that “possessory credit,” calling for his new film to be released as “Alfred Hitchcock’s
Rope.
” He would receive the same credit by contract as producer of all the Transatlantic-Warner’s films. (Later, at Universal, Lew Wasserman would arrange for his client’s name to appear in “a size type 100% of the title.”)
“I consider the possessory use of my name above the title of a film as of extraordinary value to the producing company as well to myself,” Hitchcock asserted in his 1967 deposition, aiding the Directors Guild lawsuit against the Writers Guild. “I have always considered my name and reputation to be the most valuable property right owned by me.” He added proudly “that not more than fifty directors to my knowledge have ever been granted possessory production or presentation credit, although there have literally been thousands of persons who have directed motion pictures during the past sixty years.”
Alfred Hitchcock’s
Rope
was rehearsed for several weeks with every action and corresponding camera move diagrammed on a blackboard. Crew members had to practice moving walls and furniture out of the path of the huge camera boom (the size of “a little Volkswagen, practically,” in the words of Farley Granger), while the cast had to memorize up to eleven pages of dialogue and business per reel.
All this put a certain strain on the Hollywood contingent, who were accustomed to shorter takes, briefer passages of dialogue to memorize, and simpler instructions sketching out their moves. Before filming started, the studio threw a huge press party, where Hitchcock expounded on the elaborate rehearsal and preparation. “The only thing that’s been rehearsed around here,” cracked a nervous James Stewart, “is the camera.”
Normally Hitchcock shot out of continuity, but
Rope
demanded sequential staging and filming. The opening scene, which was the first to be photographed, shows the two killers strangling David (Dick Hogan), then stuffing his body into the trunk. John Dall and Farley Granger were flawless for eight minutes, speaking their lines as they moved about between rooms, amid a flurry of rising and lowering walls. When the camera followed them back to the living room, there—“right in camera focus,” as Hitchcock later told François Truffaut—“was an electrician standing by the window!” So the whole production began with a ruined first take.
Many more such false starts followed, including a number of near-disastrous collisions with the formidable camera boom. Uncertainty and exasperation set in early, but Hitchcock was all assurance, undaunted by imperfection. The director of England’s first talkie had been through all this sort of thing before.
“We couldn’t use the sound that was recorded while he was filming,” Stewart recalled. “He made the walls and furniture with rubber wheels so they wouldn’t make any noise, and the sound people said, ‘No, you can’t
make it; it just sounds exactly like it is—a wall moving on rubber wheels.’ It didn’t bother Hitchcock. He said: ‘We’ll do the first take for the camera, and take all the microphones out.’ Then he took all the walls and furniture out and put in about twenty microphones all over the set, and we did it for sound. And there were only about five or six places where we had to redub, because of timing and everything.”
The oldest pros, Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Collier, didn’t mind the rehearsal or memorization; for them, the approach was akin to performing in the theater. “They were the most fun on the film really,” recalled Granger. “They thought it was a hoot.” After initial “nightmares, the kind I had not known since my first days in the theater,” Stewart also embraced the process as “pure joy because it was like returning to the stage where action is continuous for a full act and you either do or die.”
“Jimmy, never do anything you don’t feel like doing,” Hitchcock told the star. “If it doesn’t feel natural, then we’ll work on it till it does.” This advice was somewhat complicated by the limp the director insisted that Stewart adopt; the limp was called for, Hitchcock explained, to forewarn audiences that this was “a different sort of characterization” for Stewart. (A leftover from the play, the limp is explained differently in the film. “Rupert got his bad leg in the war for his courage,” explains Mrs. Wilson; which contrasts sharply with Brandon’s smart-aleck remark, “Good Americans usually die young on the battlefield.”)
If Stewart eschewed any homosexual implications, if his limp wasn’t very convincing, if Stewart wasn’t entirely at his ease as an armchair philosopher extolling “the art of murder,” and if in the end his good-guy persona did evince limitations, then Hitchcock would learn those limitations and put that knowledge to good use in
Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much
, and
Vertigo.
And Stewart nonetheless gave a compelling performance.
“Jimmy Stewart was Jimmy Stewart,” Arthur Laurents reflected, “which meant not a whiff of sex of any kind. He does dominate the picture, though, with ease and authority. His Rupert is intelligent, attractive, laced with humor—teasing, though, rather than sardonic.”
Journalists flocked to the set during the filming, and so did a few celebrities: Noel Coward and Ingrid Bergman came out of friendship, but also to boost publicity—and in Bergman’s case, because Hitchcock was planning to duplicate the long-take methodology with his next film,
Under Capricorn.
Sidney Bernstein was a prince of a producer. He never interfered, only facilitated. At night the Transatlantic partners studied the rushes, then headed to Bellagio Road to talk things over with Mrs. Hitchcock. The Hitchcocks enjoyed tempting Bernstein with rich soufflés, wrote Caroline Moorehead. “When Sidney succumbed, Hitchcock would eat half of it, and next morning complain bitterly that his diet had been broken.”
The filming was completed by February 21; Truffaut reported that it took eighteen shooting days, while
American Cinematographer
said the number was thirty—a discrepancy that depends in part on whether at least nine days of refilming are included. Joseph Valentine, who delivered exquisite black-and-white photography for
Saboteur
and
Shadow of a Doubt
, either wouldn’t or couldn’t achieve the gradually darkening color scheme Hitchcock desired; Bernstein finally had to replace him—and Hitchcock reshot scenes where the color was too lurid. Valentine was officially reported “ill,” and a Technicolor consultant aided cameraman William V Skall, who finished the film, sharing the credit.
In the fall of 1947, a series of events conspired to alter the future of both Hitchcock and Hollywood.
In October, the House Committe on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began a set of hearings in Washington, D.C., that launched fifteen years of blacklisting. Intended to cleanse American film of Communist influences, the blacklist weakened the industry by purging talent and rendering many controversial subjects off-limits. Many in Hitchcock’s circle were affected, including Arthur Laurents, who was among the leftists driven out of town; Hume Cronyn, whose screen career was also ruptured (Cronyn’s left-liberal politics would be investigated by the HUAC later in the 1950s); Whitfield Cook, who was outraged by Hollywood’s capitulation to HUAC and soon would switch to fiction; and Sidney Bernstein, who opposed the inquisition and donated money to support the legal defense of accused “Reds.”
Television was another purgative draining the film business. Although NBC had been on the air with regular programming since 1939, the year 1948 is generally seen as the unofficial birth of national prime-time broadcasting. That was the year the three networks mounted competing full nightly schedules, and the year that the number of television stations and television sets in the country started to skyrocket.