Perpetual Movement

Alfred Hitchcock's Rope

Neil Badmington

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438484174
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The first book-length study in English of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), Perpetual Movement offers both a production history that draws extensively upon little-known archival materials, including set drawings and drafts of the screenplay, and a close examination of the film in which Neil Badmington analyzes each of Rope 's eleven shots. Writing in an accessible and engaging style, Badmington explores the film's treatment of space, sound, editing, sexuality, source material, design, intertexuality, narrative, and music. He looks at Hitchcock's struggle with censorship while planning, shooting, and distributing the film. Perpetual Movement also addresses Rope 's reception and legacy, explaining why the film's unusual qualities provide such lasting appeal for viewers.

1

Operation Rope¹

Transatlantic

AS ROPE’S FIRST SHOT CONTAINS the opening credits, in which key figures involved in the making of the film are named, it seems sensible to devote much of chapter 1 of this book to production history. In the pages that follow, I will make extensive use of archival material to draw out elements of the film’s history that have remained unknown, underdiscussed, or utterly misrepresented for over seven decades.

Rope was Alfred Hitchcock’s first color production and also his first film since his contract of employment with David O. Selznick had come to an end.² Selznick had brought Hitchcock to Hollywood from Britain at the end of the 1930s, but their professional partnership—which began with Rebecca (1940) and ended with The Paradine Case (1947)—favored Selznick financially and creatively; Patrick McGilligan sums things up neatly when he refers to Hitchcock’s “professional subservience” in the working relationship.³ Hitchcock therefore chose not to renew his contract with Selznick once he had fulfilled its legal requirements. Even though he had been allowed to work for others while employed by Selznick, Hitchcock wanted greater creative freedom, and so, with the end of his contract in sight, he founded the independent Transatlantic Pictures with Sidney Bernstein, a prominent figure in the British film industry.⁴ The deeds relating to Transatlantic were signed in early February 1946, making Bernstein’s partnership with Hitchcock a legal reality, but the friendship between the two figures went back as far as the first half of the 1920s, when both were involved with the London Film Society, which Bernstein had helped to found.⁵ Although Bernstein had known David Selznick since roughly the same period, he and Hitchcock began to plan their professional partnership while the latter was still employed by Selznick.⁶ The initial suggestion came from Hitchcock in late spring 1945; Bernstein was at first reluctant, but soon changed his mind and accepted the invitation.⁷

At around this time, with the war still underway, Bernstein had proposed to the Treasury in London “a series of filmed plays, shot on stage and using an entire battery of cameras, featuring the best British actors and the masterpieces of British drama, largely as a propaganda exercise and to capture some of the excellent productions that John Gielgud was then staging at Stratford.”⁸ These plans came to nothing, but a clear trace of them can be seen in Transatlantic’s inaugural production.⁹ When Hitchcock and Bernstein met to discuss “the subject and nature of their first film, Hitchcock suggested to Sidney that they experiment with the technique of filming and try using single long shots, each of them the length of a full reel.”¹⁰ Bernstein was persuaded, mainly because Hitchcock informed him that such an approach would make for quick and relatively inexpensive shooting, and in time they settled on an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s three-act play Rope. Hitchcock would direct, Bernstein would act as producer, and the film would, as I will explain later in this chapter, be distributed by Warner Bros.¹¹

Source(s)

Prior to the premiere of the play at the Strand Theatre, London, in March 1929, Patrick Hamilton was “a young novelist […] [with] a small readership,” as one of his biographers puts it.¹² But Rope was a major success and, along with the almost simultaneous publication of The Midnight Bell, it transformed Hamilton into a “public figure.”¹³ “I am known, established, pursued. The world, truly, is at my feet,” he wrote to his brother in late May 1929.¹⁴

The play tells the tale of two young men, Wyndham Brandon and Charles Granillo, who murder their friend Ronald Kentley, hide his corpse in a wooden chest in their Mayfair flat, and throw a house party while the body is still within the trunk. The play unfolds in real time over the course of a single evening—“NB: The action is continuous, and the fall of the curtain at the end of each Act denotes the lapse of no time whatever,” the stage directions stress—and builds to the discovery of the crime by Rupert Cadell, a somewhat eccentric poet who comes to suspect that all is not well in the flat.¹⁵

But if Hamilton’s play is the immediate source of Hitchcock’s film, it too has a source of its own. In May 1924, a little under five years before Rope was first performed on stage, two young and wealthy students at the University of Chicago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, kidnapped and murdered a fourteen-year-old boy named Robert Franks. Acid was poured over the genitals and face of the corpse, which was then buried in a culvert. Influenced by Nietzsche and seeing themselves as intellectually superior to others, Leopold and Loeb believed that they had planned and perpetrated “the perfect crime,” but they were soon caught and charged. Their attorney, Clarence Darrow, persuaded them to enter a plea of guilty and thus avoid trial by jury, but the resulting legal proceedings nonetheless became a huge media spectacle; Hitchcock, Patrick McGilligan reports, followed the case with interest.¹⁶ There were only one hundred seats available to the public in the court, but three thousand people tried every day to gain access to what was often called “The Trial of the Century” (even if it was not technically a trial). Leopold and Loeb managed to avoid the death penalty and were sentenced instead to life plus ninety-nine years. Loeb was killed in prison in 1936, but Leopold was released on parole for good behavior in 1958 and spent the rest of his days in Puerto Rico, where he died in 1971.¹⁷

Patrick Hamilton insisted that he had not been influenced by the Leopold and Loeb case. “It has been said,” he wrote in a preface to a 1929 edition of the play, “that I have founded ‘Rope’ on a murder which was committed in America some years ago. But this is not so, since I cannot recall this crime having ever properly reached my consciousness until after ‘Rope’ was written and people began to tell me of it.”¹⁸ This claim is, as Sean French so neatly puts it, “simply not credible”: if Hitchcock’s Rope leads back to Hamilton’s Rope, then the latter leads firmly further back to Leopold and Loeb.¹⁹

A trace of the real-life murder in Illinois surfaced during the making of the film, in fact. On February 20, 1948, while shooting was still underway, Barney Balaban of Paramount Pictures wrote to Harry Warner to report that a friend of his, Hugo Sonnenschein, had been contacted by Allen and Ernie Loeb. They had, Balaban related, heard about the new Hitchcock film that was in production with Warner Bros. and were, as relatives of Richard Loeb, worried about the distress that allusions to the Leopold and Loeb case could cause; they were also concerned that Rope might stir up antisemitism when released. (The murderers of Robert Franks were both Jewish.) Balaban’s letter proceeded to urge Warner Bros., on Sonnenschein’s behalf, to eliminate all direct invocations of the Leopold and Loeb case and to minimize allusions to Jews. Harry Warner passed Balaban’s note to his brother Jack, who replied to Balaban on March 5, 1948. Hitchcock himself, he reported, had insisted that Rope had nothing to do with the murder of Robert Franks and that there were no Jewish characters at all in the film. Had the studio known of the echoes of the Leopold and Loeb case, Warner added, they would never have become involved with the project, but the film was now finished, and Warner Bros. had, he explained, a financial interest in it. On March 23, 1948, Balaban wrote back to say that Mr. and Mrs. Sonnenschein had recently attended a preview screening of Rope. They were pleased with what they saw.²⁰

Adaptation

Hitchcock enjoyed the original stage production of Rope in London in 1929 and immediately took an interest in directing an adaptation for the screen.²¹ This came to nothing at the time, though he approached Patrick Hamilton in 1936 “to see if he had any interest in writing a film script for him” and then turned down the chance to direct a screen version of Hamilton’s play Gas Light in 1942.²² Sidney Bernstein was also impressed by Hamilton’s play on stage, and it was eventually decided, as Transatlantic Pictures began to take shape, that Rope would be its first production.²³ Hitchcock’s fee for directing was $150,000.²⁴ On March 20, 1947, Hamilton signed two contracts with Transatlantic. The first gave Hitchcock and Bernstein, for the price of £6500, the rights to film an adaptation of Rope. The second employed the writer for ten weeks to work on the project, traveling from the UK to the USA if necessary; for this, Hamilton would be paid £3000 (at a rate of £300 per week).²⁵ He began the process of adapting his play and visited Sidney Bernstein regularly at his apartment in Arlington House, in London’s St. James’s; furthe...