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 wrote in 1982: "The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma's." Hitchcock began work on his tenth film, "Blackmail" (1929), when its production company, British International Pictures (BIP), converted its Elstree studios to sound. The film was the first British ""; it followed the first American sound feature film, "The Jazz Singer" (1927). "Blackmail" began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, with the climax taking place on the dome of the British Museum. It also features one of his longest cameo appearances, which shows him being bothered by a small boy