Alfred Hitchcock (76 page)

Transatlantic’s search for stories that it could purchase cheaply and quietly—stories that might appeal equally to English and American moviegoers, to bank loan officers, Warner Bros. executives, and Hollywood stars—continued to be problematic. Ingrid Bergman’s commitments forced
Under Capricorn
to be reslotted as the second Transatlantic production, but strong candidates for the first remained elusive. One project that met a fast demise was the idea of a Hitchcockian
Hamlet
starring Cary Grant. For one thing, a professor who had written a contemporary novel based on Shakespeare’s play began threatening a lawsuit after reading of Hitchcock’s similar idea in Transatlantic’s inaugural announcement. The new company couldn’t open for business under a cloud of litigation. Besides, the partners concluded, transplanting
Hamlet
to modern America was easier said than done.

Scrambling to find another vehicle for Cary Grant, Hitchcock turned to a provocative drama that had intrigued him ever since it was first staged at the Ambassadors Theater in 1929. The plot of Patrick Hamilton’s play
Rope
was billed as “suggested by Thomas De Quincey”—Hitchcock enjoyed quoting his
Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
—but drew its more obvious inspiration from a notorious American crime of 1924.

Hitchcock had followed the newspaper stories about Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, a pair of reportedly brilliant University of Chicago students and homosexual lovers who were obsessed with the superman theories of Nietzsche. In order to prove their superior intellects, Leopold and Loeb had committed a completely motiveless killing—murdering a young acquaintance just for the thrill of it. Their “perfect crime” was marred, however, by a series of stupid mistakes that led to their arrest. Despite being defended by famed attorney Clarence Darrow, the two were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Hitchcock had seen and admired Hamilton’s play about two similarly well-bred friends who murder a classmate for sadistic reasons and stash his body in a trunk in the living room of their London flat. Inviting the victim’s parents and others to a get-together at the apartment, the killers then entertain their guests in the presence of the corpse.

The director had always talked about actresses as dormant volcanoes, but over the years he had found himself saddled with actors who curiously resisted smoldering in love scenes. Several of them—Ivor Novello, Henry Kendall, John Gielgud, and Michael Redgrave—were homosexual or bisexual in real life, and notably diffident about women.
The Lodger, Rich and Strange, Secret Agent
, and
The Lady Vanishes
had been, to some extent, hampered by their unromantic performances. Hitchcock had already shown, with Handel Fane in
Murder!
, a fascination with blurred sexual identity; and now, by making that idea the cornerstone of a Hitchcock film, he took a bold leap in his thinking.

Hitchcock had been thinking about
Rope
for several years; he mentioned the play to Peter Viertel while working on
Saboteur
, suggesting that it might lend itself to being shot in continuous, carefully planned single-shot takes. He had tried that technique on
The Paradine Case
, only to be stymied by Selznick. Now, during one of their Transatlantic meetings, Bernstein happened to mention his feeling that the most important West End plays ought to be filmed just as they had been staged, preserving them as landmarks of English culture. Hitchcock seized the opportunity to raise the idea of filming
Rope.

Hamilton’s play had thus far scared off film producers, the director observed, so the rights would probably be inexpensive to obtain; and the play had been performed on Broadway, so American audiences would recognize it. As Hamilton had transplanted the Chicago case to London, Hitchcock saw no problem in moving it back to New York. Cary Grant could play one of the major roles. And the idea of filming it in sequential long takes, he perceived early on, would yield side benefits in both costs and publicity.

By early 1947, with
The Paradine Case
still slogging through production, the idea had gained momentum. Hitchcock was already telling close friends he was planning to shoot his next film within the confines of a single
stage set, and entirely in continuous nine-and-a-half-minute takes. Cary Grant was penciled in as the star. Bernstein convened script conferences with the playwright in Transatlantic’s Wardour Street offices in London.

Warner Bros. was encouraged to see
Rope
as a run-for-cover crime film. Eager to set their first Hitchcock film in motion—starring Cary Grant, after all—the studio accepted the director’s hasty assurances that he could overcome any censorship objections, and the project was formally slated as Transatlantic’s first production.

Preoccupied by the more immediate project, Warner’s also overlooked another property the partners had cheaply optioned and were touting as the third Transatlantic film, to follow
Under Capricorn.
This was
Nos Deux Consciences
(“Our Two Consciences”), a 1902 French play written by Paul Bourde, a man of letters and editor of the daily paper
Le Temps
, under the pseudonym Paul Anthelme. Hitchcock had seen the play in London in the early 1930s; now, after meeting with French playwright Louis Verneuil, who was peddling the rights in Hollywood, Transatlantic commissioned a translation and film treatment from Verneuil.

Hitchcock didn’t encounter much competition in procuring rights to the 1902 play—especially given the fact that its protagonist was a priest who is executed for a crime he didn’t commit. At the start of Anthelme’s story, the priest hears a murderer’s confession, but when questioned by police is forced to abide by his vow of secrecy. The priest then becomes the chief suspect; unable to explain himself, he is arrested, tried, and executed. It was a bold premise, one to which few other directors might have been drawn. But daunted by
The Dark Duty
, Hitchcock saw the French play as an opportunity to make an anti-capital punishment thriller without paying too much money for the rights.

The wrong-man priest seemed a dubious premise to Warner’s, but Hitchcock pitched it as another run-for-cover crime film. There wasn’t any treatment (much less a script) to object to, and at studio meetings it was the least pressing subject. Again Hitchcock boasted of how cleverly he would handle the censorship obstacles, and of his intention to snare the biggest, most unlikely star imaginable to play the priest. Cary Grant, Cary Grant, Cary Grant, the director cooed, and the Warner’s officials were lulled into complacency.

At least
Rope
and the wrong-man priest could be rationalized as Transatlantic pictures. What really mattered to Warner Bros. was the projects that Hitchcock had promised to direct for the studio. The first of these was also penciled into the deal by the end of 1947: Transatlantic had optioned a British crime novel called
Running Man
; about to be published in England, it would see U.S. publication a year later as
Outrun the Constable.
The novelist, Selwyn Jepson, had little American reputation, so once again the rights weren’t costly.

With its London-based story of a young woman forced to play detective in
order to rescue a man wrongly accused of murder, the property looked appealing to Warner’s. It would be their
own
Hitchcock run-for-cover—without any thrill-seeking killers or doomed priests. And so
Rope
and
Under Capricorn
for Transatlantic, and
I Confess
(the wronged-priest film, also for Transatlantic), were now joined by
Outrun the Constable
(for Warner Bros.) as the projects on Hitchcock’s future agenda over the summer of 1947.

Patrick Hamilton was invited to try his hand adapting
Rope
to the screen, but the playwright distrusted the medium of film, and without Hitchcock at his side Sidney Bernstein couldn’t guide their talks to success. “Neither Sidney nor Hamilton,” wrote Caroline Moorehead, “could see a way of transforming one of the clues, a ticket for the theater, which on stage could be handled in conversation, into a realistic shot on camera.”

The ever obliging James Bridie offered a few ideas, but by mid-March Hitchcock had nominated a left-field substitute: Hume Cronyn. “Why me?” Cronyn, the able actor from
Lifeboat
and
Shadow of a Doubt
, wondered. “I had no screenwriter credits. A couple of my short stories had been published; I’d written and sold a screenplay that was never made and that I doubt he [Hitchcock] ever saw. Perhaps he just wanted someone to talk to.”

Why not? Cronyn was intelligent; he had an easygoing friendship with the director. Hitchcock must have read at least one sample of his writing—a published account of the filming of
Lifeboat.
And Cronyn was familiar with New York, the new setting for
Rope.
This would become the first of several important Hitchcock films to adopt the setting of America’s greatest metropolis—its London.

Hitchcock and Cronyn began by talking, simply jawing their way through the script at Bellagio Road. “Then I would go back to North Rockingham Avenue [where he lived] and put it all down on paper,” recalled Cronyn. “We did not meet every day; I was too busy scribbling for that. When we did meet, there were certain hazards to be avoided; one of the most severe was that I should not get drunk. Hitch was a great believer in a relaxed approach to work, and before lunch the wine bottle would appear and he would descant on the vineyard, the vintage, and the nature of the grape as he poured and poured again. …

“Early on in the working relationship I discovered a curious trick of his,” said Cronyn. “We would be discussing some story point with great intensity, trembling on the edge of a solution to the problem at hand, when Hitch would suddenly lean back in his chair and say, ‘Hume, have you heard the story of the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter?’ I would look at him blankly and he would proceed to tell it with great relish, frequently commenting on the story’s characters, the nature of the humor involved, and the philosophical demonstration implied. That makes it sound as though the stories might be profound or at least witty.

They were neither. They were generally seventh-grade jokes of the sniggery school, and frequently infantile.”

One day, Cronyn asked the director challengingly: “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?” asked Hitchcock.

“Stop to tell jokes at a critical juncture.”

“It’s not so critical—it’s only a film.”

“But we were just about to find a solution to the problem. … I can’t even remember what it was now.”

“Good. We were pressing. … You never get it when you press.”

Cronyn said later that he never forgot “that little piece of philosophy” Hitchcock offered, “either as an actor or as a sometime writer.” Or another tidbit Hitchcock disgorged one day, during an argument about a story point. Seizing a pad and pencil, the director sketched a circle.

“This is the pie,” Hitchcock said. “We keep trying to cut into it here.” To illustrate, he carved a wedge into the circle’s perimeter. “What we must try to do is
this
—” Hitchcock said, his pencil racing around to the opposite side of the circle and digging out a different wedge.

“What does that mean?” asked Cronyn. “Turn day into night? Color into black and white? Change our antagonist into our hero?”

“Maybe,” answered the director. “What we’re doing is so … expected. I want to be surprised.”

Sometime in April, Arthur Laurents, another dark horse, joined the rotation, even as Cronyn continued developing the treatment. Sidney Bernstein flew to New York to meet Laurents and approve the hire, telling the new writer, “Every line must be a gem, my dear boy. Literature, that’s what we want, literature!” (This intimidating advice—the very opposite of Hitchcock’s approach—was one reason that the director would keep his partner at arm’s length during the development of future scripts.)

Laurents was a young, bright, bitterly funny New Yorker whose second play, a flop called
Heartsong
, had been backed by David O. Selznick’s ex-wife Irene, now a Broadway producer. Laurents had just finished his first Hollywood experience, rewriting
The Snake Pit.
Although he wouldn’t be credited for his work on the Anatole Litvak film, Laurents came with high recommendation from Litvak and Irene Selznick.

And he was homosexual—not unimportant among his credentials. Even Laurents suspected that Hitchcock had hired him because
Rope
“was to be filmed as a play and I was a playwright, and because its central characters were homosexual and I might be homosexual.” Not only that: Laurents was also having an affair with Goldwyn contract actor Farley Granger, whom Hitchcock already foresaw as Phillip, the weaker-willed of the two killers.
^*

In April, Laurents had not yet moved in with Granger, so Laurents doubted whether the director knew for certain they were lovers. Yet their affair was open gossip in Hollywood—and the sort of show business whispering that Hitchcock, a connoisseur of gossip, would have relished. Still, neither Laurents nor Hitchcock ever mentioned it.

“At Warner Brothers studio in Burbank where
Rope
was shot, homosexuality was the unmentionable, known only as ‘it,’ ” Laurents recalled in his memoir. “It wasn’t in the picture, no character was ‘one.’ Fascinating was how Hitchcock nevertheless made clear to me that he wanted ‘it’ in the picture. And of course, he was innuendoing to the converted. I knew it had to be self-evident but not so evident that the censors or the American Legion would scream. It’s there; you have to look but it’s there all right.”

While Cronyn served as a sounding board, Laurents began working independently on the actual script—the kind of awkward overlap that wasn’t uncommon with Hitchcock, or Hollywood in general. While Cronyn wrote, Hitchcock met with Laurents, but Laurents was “never shown what Hume [Cronyn] did”—which helps explain why he spent the rest of his life insisting that Cronyn had done little or nothing.