Perpetual Movement

Neil Badmington

Description

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.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Archival Sources

Introduction: Entangled

1. Operation Rope

2. Inside

3. Entrances, Elsewheres

4. In the Bedroom

5. Just Plain Something

6. Miss Sashweight of the Blunt Instrument Department

7. From OR to "We"

8. Two Small Fugitives from a Bowl of Alphabet Soup

9. Faking Freud

10. Cat and Mouse

11. Arrest Indicated

Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Film
• History of film
• Filmmaking
• Visual culture
• Popular culture
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438484174
• Langue: English

Extrait

Perpetual Movement

Perpetual Movement
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope

Neil Badmington
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Badmington, Neil, author.
Title: Perpetual movement: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope / Neil Badmington.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438484150 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438484174 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938491
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Felix, Dylan, and Maria, who toiled tirelessly in the swimming pools of Los Angeles, while I splashed around in the Hitchcock archives
To the memory of Catherine Belsey (1940–2021)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Archival Sources
Introduction: Entangled
1 Operation Rope
2 Inside
3 Entrances, Elsewheres
4 In the Bedroom
5 Just Plain Something
6 Miss Sashweight of the Blunt Instrument Department
7 From OR to “We”
8 Two Small Fugitives from a Bowl of Alphabet Soup
9 Faking Freud
10 Cat and Mouse
11 Arrest Indicated
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations 2.1 Phillip and Brandon, nose to shoulder. 2.2 Brandon and Phillip—“charm.” 4.1 Shot 4 begins. 4.2 Phillip and Brandon—criss-cross. 4.3 Janet is revealed. 4.4 Mrs. Wilson is revealed. 4.5 Brandon’s inclination. 4.6 The death of David. 4.7 David and Janet in the publicity trailer for Rope . 4.8 Kenneth and Phillip greet Mrs. Atwater. 4.9 Back cover of the 1948 novelization of Rope . 6.1 Frames within frames. 6.2 Three spaces, three scenes. 7.1 OR outside the window. 7.2 Brandon leaning. 8.1 The Reduco advertisement in Lifeboat (1944). 9.1 Proximity.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the following people for help, advice, suggestions, conversations, and general support during the writing of this book: Areej Al-Khafaji, Kate Belsey, Ivan Callus, Michael Campochiaro, Rafael Chaiken, Chu-chueh Cheng, Ned Comstock, James Corby, Carl Distefano, Rob Gossedge, Camille Hale, Ann Heilmann, Dawn Knight, Rebecca Lemon, Anthony Mandal, Emma Mason, Irene Morra, Becky Munford, Eileen Nizer, James Peltz, David Skilton, Andy Stafford, Julia Thomas, Richard Vine, Damian Walford Davies, Chris Whiteoak, Martin Willis, Charles Wilson, Michael Wood, and Anthony Zegarelli.
Every working day I miss having Iain Morland as a colleague, but our conversations continue over dinner and I benefitted greatly from talking through this project with him—just as I have with every book that I’ve written.
The staff at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, made me feel welcome and helped me to navigate the institution’s archives in April 2018; I am particularly grateful to Louise Hilton, Marisa Duron, and Stacey Behlmer. Meanwhile, Brett Service was a patient guide and generous supplier of blank index cards when I visited the Warner Bros. Archive at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in March and April of 2019.
Amanda Glover took care of travel, and Mel Griffin and her team at Griffin Books, Penarth, always managed to get hold of things for me far more quickly than her global internet rivals ever could.
Attending a meeting of the Futures of Literature Network at the University of Malta in October 2017 helped me at a crucial moment to think more clearly about the style and mood of this book. During that visit, Marija Grech explained Maltese bus routes to me and thereby accidentally engineered the strange encounter that I relate in my introduction.
I have learned a great deal about Rope by discussing it with the students of my Hitchcock module at Cardiff University over the years, and it was a similar joy to talk about aspects of the director’s work with pupils at St. David’s Catholic Sixth Form College, Cardiff, in January 2018. Lisa Newman, Pip Jones, and Liz French made this visit possible and pulled out all the stops to have my name emblazoned on an orange traffic cone in the car park.
Introducing a special screening of Rope at Snowcat Cinema, Penarth, seventy years to the day since the film’s premiere will always be one of the highlights of my career. Ben Rive made this event possible and would win the Academy Award for Best Owner of an Independent Cinema every year if such a thing existed. Public discussions of Hitchcock’s films at Snowcat have since become a regular part of my life, and one that I treasure.
I am particularly grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who read an earlier version of Perpetual Movement for the editorial board of SUNY Press and made various helpful, thoughtful suggestions.
This book could not have been written without the time and funding made available by Cardiff University’s Research Leave Fellowship Scheme. I thank the institution for its support.
Murray Pomerance was receptive, encouraging, challenging (in only a good way), and understanding from the outset. I could not have asked for a better editor and guide.
NB
Cardiff, May 2020
Note on Archival Sources
This book draws extensively upon material preserved in two archives: the Warner Bros. Archive at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills. For the sake of convenience, I will refer to these simply as “Warner Bros. Archive” and “Margaret Herrick Library” throughout this book.
Introduction
Entangled
I SPENT A YEAR TANGLED UP in Rope .
My working days during those months were ones of “pleasing monotony,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Mann. 1 Every morning I would make coffee, sit in a chair, and watch Alfred Hitchcock’s experimental film of 1948 about two young men named Brandon and Phillip, who murder one of their friends in the name of art, intellectual superiority, and “the perfect crime.” 2 I would pause the action every so often to make notes, to read a relevant text, or to pen paragraphs towards the book that you are now reading. Outside, the seasons came and went, bringing difference to the view from my window. But inside, the routine remained flatly the same day after day: Rope, Rope , and more Rope . A line from Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer often haunted me: “And I ask myself, Why is there no way but this for me to fill my hours?” 3
It was a strange, disorienting experience—a claustrophobic experiment inspired by a claustrophobic experiment. By the time I became a “sojourner in civilized life again” and handed over the first version of the typescript of Perpetual Movement to the publisher in the summer of 2019, I had spent hundreds of hours watching a film that runs for a touch under eighty minutes. 4 I often felt lost or trapped in Rope , as if I were a friend of Phillip and Brandon, an unacknowledged guest at their macabre party. (On more difficult days I wished that I were inside their fine wooden trunk with only the corpse of David Kentley for company.) The word “diegesis” lost a little of its differentiating hold, as did the familiar distinction between life and text. I sometimes dreamed about the film and occasionally caught myself imitating a character’s mannerisms or style of speech (Brandon, usually, for the record). I found myself unconsciously mouthing the dialogue with the actors while I watched. Sometimes I would utter lines from the script involuntarily before they had been spoken on screen—a case of the entangled critic as prompter. I still do not feel, though, that I have managed to free myself from Rope , to escape from its textual bind. I lived daily with and within the film for a year, and I have devoted an entire book to it, but the pages that follow do not claim to pronounce a final shrugging verdict, a burying assessment; I have no interest here in what Roland Barthes once called “the monster of totality.” 5 Rope comes out on top.
Why?
Why did I sacrifice a year of my life to a film about a sacrifice? What was the point? What did I discover? What, now that the experiment is over, do I have to report?
I found myself facing something like these questions a couple of months into the project. Examining duties took me briefly to Malta, where my hosts invited me also to attend a meeting of their “Futures of Literature” seminar during my final full day on the island. The topic for discussion was “creative criticism,” and all those participating were asked to read in advance the introduction to Stephen Benson and Clare Connors’s field-defining anthology on the subject. 6 On the afternoon before the seminar, after my work as examiner was completed, I made precise plans: catch the bus from my hotel in Attard to the ancient walled city of Mdina, see the sights, read the set