The “stupid” 1948 movie that Alfred Hitchcock disowned: “I abandoned pure cinema”
To be a good director, you have to take risks. It’s never going to be easy, and it’s not always going to work out, but to experiment is to actually push your boundaries. When it works, you might be breaking new ground. Where’s the fun in trying to play it safe, anyway?
Alfred Hitchcock was a pioneer from the very beginning, practically inventing the modern concept of a suspense-laden thriller in 1927 when he made The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, inspired by the story of Jack the Ripper. The filmmaker continuously made movies that played with tension, leading the audience to accuse a certain character of being guilty, only to pull the rug from under us and shock us.
The ‘wrong man’ trope originated from Hitchcock’s unique brand of thriller filmmaking, with the director always prioritising the act of keeping viewers on their toes. You can’t passively watch a Hitchcock movie, which is what makes him such a legendary figure. Cinema would look awfully different if he’d never expressed an interest in the burgeoning film industry back in the silent era.
However, despite his frequent use of pioneering techniques – I mean, can you imagine the shock that audiences of the time experienced when they watched Psycho, witnessing the supposed main character brutally killed off by a mysterious figure? – Hitchcock wasn’t always successful. In 1948, he had one of his most ambitious ideas to date, but he ended up referring to the finished product as an “experiment that didn’t work out”.
Rope, starring one of his most beloved collaborators, James Stewart, was a bold project. It would require laborious shooting hours because he wanted to film long, uninterrupted takes, despite the fact that, back then, cameras couldn’t continuously film for as long as Hitchcock wanted. So, the crew had to ensure that cuts from one scene to another were flawlessly hidden so that it all appeared to be one long take, which was rather difficult.
Stewart didn’t love the process, once telling Michael Munn, “I couldn’t sleep at night after a day’s shooting on Rope. Just to do a ten-minute take is hard enough because there are always noises that ruin the sound.”
The actor even added that he’d “never found making a film so difficult”.
Hitchcock knew that he was taking a risk, and following the completion of the film, he couldn’t help but feel disappointed. While reviews were mixed, and many audiences of today believe it to be one of Hitchcock’s most interesting ideas, he simply called it “stupid”.
“I abandoned pure cinema in an effort to make the stage play mobile,” he once told MoMA. “With a flowing camera, the film played in its own time, there were no dissolves, no time-lapses in it, it was continuous action.”
Adding, “And I thought it also ought to have a continuous flow of camera narrative as well. I think it was an error technically because one abandoned pure cinema for it. But when you take a stage play in one room, it is very hard to cut it up.”
Hitchcock didn’t totally despise the film, but he could admit that his experiment didn’t work out. He realised that he’d played into a gimmick too much, leaving him with a movie that, technically, was too overblown, too formally experimental for the subject matter, perhaps. He might not have returned to one-take movies, but at least he gave it a try.
