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 lodger pacing up and down in his room above the landlady. Hitchcock had wanted the leading man to be guilty, or for the film at least to end ambiguously, but the star was Ivor Novello, a matinée idol, and the "star system" meant that Novello could not be the villain. Hitchcock told Truffaut: "You have to clearly spell it out in big letters: 'He is innocent.'" (He had the same problem years later with Cary Grant in "Suspicion" (1941).) Released in January 1927, "The Lodger" was a commercial and critical success in the UK. Hitchcock told Truffaut that the film