Alfred Hitchcock Ben Hecht consulted Robert Millikan of the California Institute of Technology about the development of a uranium bomb. Selznick complained that the notion was "science fiction", only to be confronted by the news of the detonation of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945. Hitchcock formed an independent production company, Transatlantic Pictures, with his friend Sidney Bernstein. He made two films with Transatlantic, one of which was his first colour film. With "Rope" (1948), Hitchcock experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with "Lifeboat" (1944). The film appears to
Alfred Hitchcock sinister. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman originally wrote the film with a dark tone but was pushed to a lighter, more comical tone by Hitchcock. Toward the end of his life, Hitchcock was working on the script for a spy thriller, "The Short Night", collaborating with James Costigan, Ernest Lehman and David Freeman. Despite preliminary work, it was never filmed. Hitchcock's health was declining and he was worried about his wife, who had suffered a stroke. The screenplay was eventually published in Freeman's book "The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock" (1999). Having refused a CBE in 1962, Hitchcock was appointed a Knight