Was the scene of the round library with rotunda filmed at the British Museum or was that a different location. It's a cool set-up for a library, other than the wasted space part, I wonder if it's still around.
shareIt was the Reading Room of the British Library at the time. Full details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum_Reading_Room
shareThanks, tegoodfellow. If I make it to the London Olympics, this is definitely on my Must See list.
shareAll the scenes happening at the British Museum were filmed with the use of the so-called Schüftan process, first exploited by Fritz Lang in "Metropolis", which Hitchcock had brought from Germany and already used in "The Ring".
HITCHCOCK - "You have a mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, and in it you reflect a full picture of the British Museum. I had some photos taken with with half-hour exposure - nine of them taken in various rooms in the museum - and we made them into transparencies so that we could backlight them. That is more luminous than a flat photograph. It was like a big lantern slide, about twelve by fourteen. And then I scraped the silvering away in the mirror only in the portions where I wanted the man to be seen running, and those portions we built on the stage. For example, one room was the Egyptian room - there was glass cases there. All we built were the door frames from one room to another. We even had a man looking into a case, and he wasn't looking into anything on the stage. I did nine shots like this."
The reason given by Hitchcock to Truffaut for the use of the Schüftan process in the British museum climax of "Blackmail" was that there wasn't enough light in the museum to film the scenes. Elsewhere, I've read that the British Museum wouldn't allow a full cast and crew to occupy its premises, and that, in any case, the budget couldn't indulge the location work. Perhaps all three reasons are true.
João Pedro