Hitch shows us the ropes
QUESTION How did Alfred Hitchcock create the illusion that his 1948 film Rope was created in a single take?
ALFRED HITCHCOCK’s Rope was based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play of the same name. The play was set in London and was inspired by the real-life murder by university students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb of teenager Bobby Franks as an expression of their supposed intellectual superiority.
When the play starts, the killers hide their victim’s body in a chest and proceed to host a party for unwitting friends and family at which the chest containing the corpse is used to serve a buffet.
Hitchcock’s version, which transferred the action to New York, was the first of four of his films to feature James Stewart, who plays a suspicious teacher called Rupert Cadell.
For Rope, Hitchcock wanted to tell the story of his killers, Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) on a single set using a continuous piece of film recording the action in real time. The idea was to trap the viewer in the room and make them go through the same intense emotions as the characters on screen.
At that time it was not possible to shoot a single take, so the technique consisted of shooting the whole film in ten singletake reels (each 950ft reel running for approximately ten minutes).
The transitions from one take to the next were covered by the camera going into close-up of an object, usually an actor’s back, so as to make the cut from one reel to the next invisible. The next take began as the camera pulled away to film the next scene.
Hitchcock actually broke his demanding self-imposed rule three or four times — including a scene where Brandon talks about Phillip strangling chickens, Phillip shouts and then we directly cut to Rupert’s face — yet by and large he adhered to his technique. The filming was technically demanding, although the set was movable to ensure continuity. The actors could not afford to fluff their lines or timing.
In the end, Rope proved a cinematic failure because it was seen as too theatrical. The whole point of judicious editing cuts is to create dramatic tension on film where the immediacy of the stage can’t be replicated.
Lionel Foster, London N11.
QUESTION Where did Australian Aborigines originate?
ALL modern humans are descended from populations of Homo sapiens that lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.
Between 75,000 and 60,000 years ago, a small group of humans left Africa and over the next 50,000 years, their descendants colonised the world’s other continents except Antarctica, in the process replacing all other human species.
The migrations were aided by low sea levels (about 250ft lower than today) during glaciations, which created land bridges linking islands and continents.
It was in this era of initial colonisation of the globe that modern racial characteristics evolved.
A land bridge at the southern end of the modern-day Red Sea offered a route out of Africa into the Arabian Peninsula. From the Red Sea crossing, the first migrants probably followed a southern route eastward along the coast of the Arabian Peninsula.
This path would have kept them in warm weather and close to the sea, a major food source. They spread around the enlarged coastal regions of India and Sri Lanka, then on to the Andaman Islands and modern-day Indonesia. At this time, most of the East Indies, or maritime SouthEast Asia, was one land mass called Sunda. The migrants continued on the coastal route south- east until they reached the straits between Sunda and Sahul, the land mass that was made up of present-day Australia and New Guinea.
The land bridge connecting New Guinea and Australia became submerged about 8,000 years ago. The shores of Australia extended out several hundred miles further than they do today, and the low sea level between Timor and northern Australia allowed what is considered to be humanity’s first sea crossing, a distance of about 100 miles.
Archaeological evidence suggests the first human settlers made it to Australia 50,000 years ago.
By about 35,000 years ago, the whole continent was occupied. The wealth of food available meant Aborigines remained a hunter-gatherer society.
Tom Davies, Sydney.
QUESTION Which activities popular with children 50 years ago would not be allowed today?
FURTHER to earlier answers, when I was at school in Malvern in 1958, I was put in charge of the mortar on the Combined Cadet Force field day. I would strike the fuse on a thunderflash and drop it down the tube. Just before it fired off, I’d strike the second one and drop that down, whereupon the first fired off the second, which then exploded among the ‘infantry’. Goodness knows what health and safety would make of that.
Hugh Bladon, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. WHEN I was evacuated in the war to live with my cousins in Windermere, my uncle bought a 12ft clinker built rowing boat.
We four children, the eldest nine, the youngest five, would take it out, mooring on islands to bury pennies and making treasure maps to find them again. We did not have life jackets.
Many years later, I berated my aunt for allowing us to row off without adult supervision. She replied: ‘Well, you were all right, weren’t you!’
Claire Bellenis, Ossett, W. Yorks.
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