Hmmm.....I was quoting from a webpage about Patrick Hamilton and ROPE....but it looks as though he may have been contracted and did some writing, but that Laurents is credited with the screenplay. I haven't read AL's book in a long time, and I forget if he wrote about it.
In his biography of Patrick Hamilton “Through a Glass Darkly”, Nigel Jones goes into considerable detail about the screenplay of ROPE. In summary, he says that after agreeing to give Hitchcock the go-ahead to film it, Hamilton was himself asked to do the screenplay and he worked on a preliminary script treatment of ROPE for producer Sidney Bernstein at Elstree Studios in England in 1947. Hamilton wrote to his brother to say “Under my contract I can be called upon to do another six weeks – either here or in Hollywood – I hope to heaven here.”
Nigel Jones goes on to say that when Sidney Bernstein returned to Hollywood, Hamilton’s treatment was delivered into the hands of Hume Cronyn, who rewrote the plot, giving the Rupert Cadell character an anguished guilt over having led the murderers astray with his teachings of Nietzsche. Behind Cronyn’s back, Hitchcock brought in a third writer, Arthur Laurents, to write the film’s dialogue. Laurents handed his first draft to Hitchcock and when he came back to do the rewrite he found that Hitchcock had inserted some of the original play into the text and made other adjustments such as making the homosexual bond between the killers more explicit.
Hamilton disliked the finished film and felt that he had been bribed into getting involved by a mixture of assurances that his text would be adhered to and threats that if he did not take part, his script would be mangled by lesser writers.
Great story, especially to think that anyone could take an Arthur Laurents script and make it more gay.
Perhaps the story behind Rope is more interesting than the film itself. I like a lot of it, but, by the end, it always feels like it's more of an exercise, a demonstration of Hitchcock showing how good he is, than it is about entertaining the audience.
