F.T. We had a picture along those lines in France, Jacques Prévert’s The Lovers of Verona, which was directed by André Cayatte. But there seems to be a general impression that backstage stories don’t make box-office hits.
A.H. It depends on the way they’re handled. They made a movie here called What Price Hollywood? that was a big success, and A Star Is Born, which was very good.
F.T. That’s true, and there’s also Singin’ in the Rain, which had some wonderful gags on the early days of talking pictures.
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F.T. The Paradine Case scenario is credited to Selznick himself, with the adaptation by Mrs. Hitchcock—Alma Reville—of a novel by Robert Hichens.III
A.H. Robert Hichens also wrote The Garden of Allah, Bella Donna, and many other novels; he was famous in the early part of this century. Mrs. Hitchcock and I did the original script, which Selznick wanted for budget purposes. Then I recommended James Bridie, a Scottish playwright who had a big reputation in England as well. He was in his early sixties and a very independent man. Selznick brought him to New York, but when he wasn’t met at the airport, he took the first plane back to London. He worked on the script in England and sent it over to us; the arrangement wasn’t too successful. But Selznick wanted to do the adaptation himself; that’s the way he did things in those days. He would write a scene and send it down to the set every other day—a very poor method of work.
Let’s go over some of the more apparent flaws of that picture. First of all, I don’t think that Gregory Peck can properly represent an English lawyer.
F.T. Whom would you have chosen?
A.H. I would have brought in Laurence Olivier. I also considered Ronald Colman for the part. For a while we hoped we might get Greta Garbo to make her comeback in the role of the wife. But the worst flaw in the casting was assigning Louis Jourdan to play the groom. After all, the story of The Paradine Case is about the degradation of a gentleman who becomes enamored of his client, a woman who is not only a murderess, but also a nymphomaniac. And that degradation reaches its climactic point when he’s forced to confront the heroine with one of her lovers, who is a groom. But that groom should have been a manure-smelling stable hand, a man who really reeked of manure.
Unfortunately, Selznick had already signed up Alida Valli—he thought she was going to be another Bergman—and he also had Louis Jourdan under contract, so I had to use them, and this miscasting was very detrimental to the story.
Aside from that, I myself was never too clear as to how the murder was committed, because it was complicated by people crossing from one room to another, up and down a corridor. I never truly understood the geography of that house or how she managed the killing. What interested me in this picture was to take a person like Mrs. Paradine, to put her in the hands of the police, to have her submit to all their formalities, and to say to her maid, as she was leaving her home between the two inspectors, “I don’t think I shall be back for dinner.” And then to show her spending the night in a cell, from which, in fact, she will never emerge. There is an echo of that situation in The Wrong Man.
It may be an expression of my own fear, but I’ve always felt the drama of a situation in which a normal person is suddenly deprived of freedom and incarcerated with hardened criminals. There’s nothing to it when a habitual lawbreaker, like a drunk, is involved, but I am intrigued by the contrast in shading when it happens to a person of a certain social standing.
F.T. The contrast is very well pointed up by a little incident that takes place when she gets to the prison. A prison matron runs her fingers through the woman’s, hair to make sure she isn’t concealing anything. It seems to me that Ann Todd, in the role of the lawyer’s wife, was also an unfortunate choice.
A.H. She was too coldly written, I’m afraid.
F.T. Actually, the best characters in the picture are some of the secondary figures. I’m referring to Charles Laughton, who plays the judge, and Ethel Barrymore’s performance as his wife. They have a wonderful scene together, toward the end of the picture, when Ethel Barrymore indicates her compassion for Alida Valli while Charles Laughton shows no mercy whatever.
At another point in the picture there’s a scene between him and Ann Todd to show that he’s a lustful man. First, there’s the look in his eyes, with the camera then traveling over to Ann Todd’s bare shoulders. Now, in front of her husband and his wife, he walks over to the couch, sits down next to her and coolly puts his hand on top of hers. This little episode is handled discreetly, yet the impact is outrageous.
A.H. Very much so. All the elements of the conflict were presented in the first part in order to let the trial get off to an exciting start.
There is an interesting shot in the courtroom when Louis Jourdan is called in to give evidence; he comes into the courtroom and must pass behind Alida Valli. She’s turning her back to him, but we wanted to give the impression that she senses his presence—not that she guesses he’s there—that she actually can feel him behind her, as if she could smell him. We had to do that in two takes. The camera is on Alida Valli’s face, and in the background you see Louis Jourdan coming down to the witness box. First, I photographed the scene without her; the camera panned him all around, at a two-hundred-degree turn, from the door to the witness box. Then, I photographed her in the foreground; we sat her in front of the screen, on a twisting stool, so that we might have the revolving effect, and when the camera went off her to go back to Louis Jourdan, she was pulled off the screen. It was quite complicated, but it was very interesting to work that out.
F.T. Of course the highlight of the trial is that very high shot showing Gregory Peck as he’s leaving the courtroom when he gives up his client’s defense. I agree with you that Laurence Olivier would have been far better suited for that part. Whom did you have in mind for the character played by Louis Jourdan?
Hitchcock is probably explaining to Ann Todd the reaction of Charles Laughton upon seeing her bare shoulder.
A.H. Robert Newton.
F.T. I see what you mean. He would have been perfect as a rough character.
A.H. With horny hands, like the devil!
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I. Constance (Ingrid Bergman) is a doctor in an insane asylum. Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), the asylum director, is about to retire, and the staff is awaiting the arrival of his successor, Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck). Constance falls in love with her new chief, but after a while she discovers that he is a mental case who has assumed the identity of Dr. Edwardes. When he becomes aware of his amnesic condition, he is convinced he must have killed the real doctor and he runs away from the clinic. Constance manages to track him down. Since he is wanted by the police, she takes him into hiding, to the home of her former professor (Michael Chekhov), who will be able to analyze the sick man’s dreams and the reasons for his guilt complex. The professor finds out that the pseuda-Edwardes has always felt responsible for the accidental death of his younger brother during their childhood and is suffering from shock at having witnessed Dr. Edwardes’ death in a similar manner. It turns out that this death was not an accident, but a premeditated murder by Dr. Murchison to save his position. The film winds up with the criminal being exposed and the lovers free to embark on a happy life together.
II. In America, at the end of the war, a Nazi agent is sentenced to jail. His daughter, Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), who was never involved in his activities, leads a fast life. One day a government agent named Devlin (Gary Grant) approaches her with a request that she undertake a secret mission. She accepts and they go to Rio together. They fall in love, but Devlin is wary of the former playgirl and maintains a certain distance between them. Alicia’s assignment is to establish contact with Sebastian (Claude Rains), a former friend of her father’s, who harbors in his home a group of prominent Nazi refugees in Brazil. Alicia succeeds in establishing contact and becomes a regular visitor to Sebastian’s home. He falls in love with her and proposes mar
riage. She hopes Devlin will object, but when he fails to do so, she accepts the offer.
Despite the hostility of her rather terrifying mother-in-law, Alicia is now the new mistress of the Nazi household, with instructions from her employers to get hold of the keys to the cellar which Sebastian always carries with him. During a large reception Alicia and Devlin explore the cellar and discover uranium concealed in fake wine bottles.
The next morning Sebastian, aware that his bride is an American agent, begins to administer poison to Alicia, with the help of his mother. The aim is to conceal his blunder from their Nazi entourage by arranging for what will appear to be a death from natural causes.
Eventually, Devlin, alarmed at the lack of news from Alicia, forces his way into Sebastian’s household and finds Alicia critically ill.
After telling her of his love, he lifts her out of bed and carries her downstairs and through the foyer, into his car, with Sebastian looking on helplessly, unable to raise the alarm. As the car drives off, Sebastian fearfully turns back to face the circle of his compatriots, which closes ominously about him.
III. Mrs. Paradine (Alida Valli), a beautiful woman of (jucstionablc past, is accused of having murdered her blind husband. Her defense lawyer, Keane (Gregory Peck), married to a lovely wife (Ann Todd), falls deeply in love with his client and is convinced of her innocence. Before the trial he learns that Mrs. Paradine had been the mistress of the groom (Louis Jourdan).
The trial opens with Judge Harnfield (Charles Laughton), who is resentful over his unsuccessful attempt to become Mrs. Keane’s lover, openly hostile to the defense lawyer.
The groom takes the witness stand. Under Keane’s merciless badgering he accuses his mistress of the crime and later commits suicide. In open court the grief-stricken Mrs. Paradine discloses that her attorney is in love with her and defiantly confesses her guilt.
Stunned by this double blow, Keane walks out on the trial. His career has been shattered, but his wife’s steadfast loyalty is a hopeful omen for the future.
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“ROPE”: FROM 7:30 to 9:15 IN ONE SHOT ■ CLOUDS OF SPUN GLASS ■ COLORS AND SHADOWS ■ WALLS THAT FADE AWAY ■ FILMS MUST BE CUT ■ HOW TO MAKE NOISES RISE FROM THE STREET ■ “UNDER CAPRICORN” ■ INFANTILISM AND OTHER ERRORS IN JUDGMENT ■ RUN FOR COVER! ■ “INGRID, IT’S ONLY A MOVIE!” ■ “STAGE FRIGHT” ■ THE FLASHBACK THAT LIED ■ THE BETTER THE VILLAIN, THE BETTER THE PICTURE
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9
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. Rope was made in 1948. In several respects this picture is a milestone in your career. For one thing, you produced it; for another, it was your first color film; and finally,I it represented an enormous technical challenge. Is the screenplay very different from Patrick Hamilton’s stage play?I
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. No, not really. Arthur Laurents did the screenplay and Hume Cronyn worked with me on the adaptation. The dialogue was partly from the original play and partly by Laurents.
I undertook Rope as a stunt; that’s the only way I can describe it. I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it.
The stage drama was played out in the actual time of the story; the action is continuous from the moment the curtain goes up until it comes down again. I asked myself whether it was technically possible to film it in the same way. The only way to achieve that, I found, would be to handle the shooting in the same continuous action, with no break in the telling of a story that begins at seven-thirty and ends at nine-fifteen. And I got this crazy idea to do it in a single When I look back, I realize that it was quite nonsensical because I was breaking with my own theories on the importance of cutting and montage for the visual narration of a story. On the other hand, this film was, in a sense, precut. The mobility of the camera and the movement of the players closely followed my usual cutting practice. In other words, I maintained the rule of varying the size of the image in relation to its emotional importance within a given episode. Naturally, we went to a lot of trouble to achieve this, and the difficulties went beyond our problems with the camera. Since the action starts in broad daylight and ends by nightfall, we had to deal with the gradual darkening of the background by altering the flow of light between seven-thirty and nine-fifteen. To maintain that continuous action, with no dissolves and no time lapses, there were other technical snags to overcome, among them, how to reload the camera at the end of each reel without interrupting the scene. We handled that by having a figure pass in front of the camera, blacking out the action very briefly while we changed from one camera to the other. In that way we’d end on a close-up of someone’s jacket, and at the beginning of the next reel, we’d open with the same close-up of the same character.
Hitchcock appears in Under Capricorn.
F.T. Aside from all of this, I imagine that the fact that you were using color for the first time must have added to your difficulties.
A.H. Yes. Because I was determined to reduce the color to a minimum. We had built the set of an apartment, consisting of a living room, a hallway, and a section of a kitchen. The picture overlooked the New York skyline, and we had that background made up in a semicircular pattern, so that the camera might swing around the room. To show that in proper perspective, that background was three times the size of the apartment decor itself. And between the set and the skyscrapers, we had some cloud formations made of spun glass. Each cloud was separate and mobile; some were hung on invisible wires and others were on stands, and they were also set in a semicircular pattern. We had a special working plan designed for the clouds, and between reels they were shifted from left to right. They were never actually shown in motion, but you must remember that the camera wasn’t always on the window, so whenever we changed the reels, the stagehands would shift each cloud into the position designated on our working plan. And as soon as a cloud reached the edge of the horizon, it would be taken off and another one would appear in view of the window at the other side.
F.T. What about the problems with the color?
Lending some books to the father of his victim, John Dall ties them with the cord he used to kill his friend.
A.H. Toward the last four or five reels, in other words, by sunset, I realized that the orange in the sun was far too strong, and on account of that we did the last five reels all over again. We now have to digress a little to talk about color.
The average cameraman is a very fine technician. He can make a woman look beautiful; he can create natural lighting that is effective without being exaggerated. But there is often a problem that stems purely from the cameraman’s artistic taste. Does he have a sense of color and does he use good taste in his choice of colors? Now, the cameraman who handled the lighting on Rope simply said to himself, “Well, it’s just another sunset.” Obviously, he hadn’t looked at one for a long time, if ever at all, and what he did was completely unacceptable; it was like a lurid postcard.
Joseph Valentine, who photographed Rope, had also worked on Shadow of a Doubt. When I saw the initial rushes, my first feeling was that things show up much more in color than in black and white. And I discovered that it was the general practice to use the same lighting for color as for black and white. Now, as I’ve already told you, I especially admired the approach to lighting used by the Americans in 1920 because it overcame the two-dimensional nature of the image by separating the actor from the background through the use of backlights—they call them liners—to detach him from his setting. Now in color there is no need for this, unless the actor should happen to be dressed in the same color as the background, but that’s highly improbable. It sounds elementary, doesn’t it, and yet that’s the tradition, and it’s quite hard to break away from it. Surely, now that we work in color, we shouldn’t be made aware of the source of the studio lighting. And yet, in many pictures, you will find people walking through the supposedly dingy corridors between the stage and dressing rooms of a theater, and because the scene is lighted by studio are lamps, their shadows on the wall are black as coal. You just ca
n’t help wondering where those lights could possibly be coming from.
I truly believe that the problem of the lighting in color films has not yet been solved. I tried for the first time to change the style of color lighting in Torn Curtain. Jack Warren, who was on Rebecca and Spellbound with me, is the cameraman who cooperated.
We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there’s no such thing as color; in fact, there’s no such thing as a face, because until the light hits it, it is nonexistent. After all, one of the first things I learned in the School of Art was that there is no such thing as a line; there’s only the light and the shade. On my first day in school I did a drawing; it was quite a good drawing, but because I was drawing with lines, it was totally incorrect and the error was immediately pointed out to me.
Going back to Rope, there’s a little sidelight. After four or five days the cameraman went off “sick.” So I wound up with a Technicolor consultant, and he completed the job with the help of the chief electrician.
F.T. What about the problems of a mobile camera?
A.H. Well, the technique of the camera movements was worked out, in its slightest details, well beforehand. We used a dolly and we mapped out our course through tiny numbers all over the floor, which served as guide marks. All the dollyman had to do was to get his camera on position Number One or Number Two at a given cue of the dialogue, then dolly over to the next number. When we went from one room into another, the wall of the hallway or of the living room would swing back on silent rails. And the furniture was mounted on rollers so that we could push it aside as the camera passed. It was an amazing thing to see a shot taken.