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 Pacific Ocean on 10 May 1980. Hitchcock returned several times to cinematic devices such as the audience as voyeur, suspense, the wrong man or woman, and the "MacGuffin," a plot device essential to the characters but irrelevant to the audience. Thus, the MacGuffin was always hazily described (in "North by Northwest", Leo G. Carroll describes James Mason as an "importer-exporter"). Hitchcock appears briefly in most of his own films. For example, he is seen struggling to get a double bass onto a train ("Strangers on a Train"), walking dogs out of a pet shop ("The Birds"), fixing a neighbour's clock