Rope (film)

Rope
Original 1948 theatrical poster
Directed by	Alfred Hitchcock
Produced by	Alfred Hitchcock Sidney Bernstein (uncredited)
Written by	Play: Patrick Hamilton Adaptation: Hume Cronyn Screenplay: Arthur Laurents Ben Hecht (uncredited)
Starring	John Dall Farley Granger James Stewart Joan Chandler Sir Cedric Hardwicke
Music by	Musical direction: Leo F. Forbstein Music: (uncredited) David Buttolph Francis Poulenc
Cinematography	Joseph A. Valentine William V. Skall
Editing by	William H. Ziegler
Studio	Warner Bros. Pictures Transatlantic Pictures
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date(s)	August 28, 1948
Running time	80 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	US$1,500,000[1]

Rope is a 1948 American thriller film based on the play Rope (1929) by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn (treatment)^[2] and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions. Starring James Stewart, John Dall and Farley Granger, it is the first of Hitchcock's Technicolor films, and is notable for taking place in real time and being edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot through the use of long takes.

The original play was said to be inspired by the real-life murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

Plot

On a late afternoon, two brilliant young aesthetes, Brandon Shaw (Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Granger), murder a former classmate, David Kentley (Dick Hogan), in their apartment. They commit the crime as an intellectual exercise: they want to prove their superiority by committing the "perfect murder".

After hiding the body in a large antique wooden chest, Brandon and Phillip host a dinner party at the apartment which has a panoramic view of Manhattan's skyline. The guests, unaware of what has happened, include the victim’s father Mr. Kentley (Cedric Hardwicke) and aunt Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier) (his mother is not able to attend). Also there is his fiancee, Janet Walker (Joan Chandler) and her former lover Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick), who was once David's close friend.

James Stewart in the film’s trailer

In a subtle move, Brandon uses the chest containing the body as a buffet for the food, just before their maid, Mrs. Wilson (Edith Evanson) arrives to help with the party. "Now the fun begins", Brandon says when the first guests arrive.

Brandon's and Phillip's idea for the murder was inspired years earlier by conversations with their erstwhile prep-school housemaster, publisher Rupert Cadell (Stewart). While at school, Rupert had discussed with them, in an apparently approving way, the intellectual concepts of Nietzsche's Übermensch and the art of murder, a means of showing one's superiority over others. He too is among the guests at the party, since Brandon in particular feels that he would very likely approve of their "work of art".

Brandon's subtle hints about David's absence lead to a discussion on the art of murder. He appears calm and in control, although when he first speaks to Rupert, he is nervously excited, stammering. Phillip, on the other hand, is visibly upset and morose. He does not conceal it well and starts to drink too much. When David's aunt, Mrs. Atwater, who fancies herself as a fortune-teller, tells him that his hands will bring him fame, she is talking about his skill at the piano, but he appears to think that it will be notoriety.

Much of the conversation, however, focuses on David and his strange absence, which worries the guests. A suspicious Rupert quizzes a fidgety Phillip about this and about some of the inconsistencies that have been raised in conversation. For example, Phillip had vehemently denied ever strangling a chicken at the Shaws’ farm, but Rupert has personally seen Phillip strangle several. Phillip later complains to Brandon about having had a "rotten evening", not because of David's murder, but over Rupert's questioning.

Emotions run high. David's father and fiancée are disturbed, wondering why he has neither arrived nor phoned. Brandon even goes so far as to play matchmaker between Janet and Kenneth, who rather resent this and increases the tension.

Constance Collier as Mrs. Anita Atwater in the film’s trailer

Mr. Kentley decides to leave when his wife calls, overwrought because she has not heard a word from David herself. He takes with him some books Brandon has given him, tied together with the very rope Brandon and Phillip used to strangle his son; Brandon's icing on the cake.

While leaving, Rupert is handed the wrong hat, with a monogram "D.K." (as in David Kentley) inside it. Rupert returns to the apartment a short while after everyone else has departed, pretending that he has absentmindedly left his cigarette case behind. He 'plants' the case, asks for a drink and then stays to theorize about the disappearance of David, encouraged by Brandon, who seems eager to have Rupert discover the crime. A tipsy Phillip is unable to take it any more, throwing a glass and saying: "Cat and mouse, cat and mouse. But which is the cat and which is the mouse?"

Rupert lifts the lid of the chest and finds the body inside; his two former students have indeed killed David. He is horrified, but also deeply ashamed, realizing that they used his own rhetoric to rationalize murder. Rupert seizes Brandon’s gun and fires several shots into the night in order to attract the police.

Cast

John Dall, Farley Granger, and James Stewart

• John Dall as Brandon Shaw, co-murderer and host at the party
• Farley Granger as Phillip Morgan, co-murderer
• James Stewart as Rupert Cadell, prep-school housemaster and publisher
• Douglas Dick as Kenneth Lawrence
• Joan Chandler as Janet Walker, columnist and David's fiancee
• Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Mr. Henry Kentley, David's father
• Constance Collier as Mrs. Anita Atwater, David's aunt
• Edith Evanson as Mrs. Wilson, housekeeper
• Dick Hogan as David Kentley, victim

Production

The film is one of Hitchcock’s most experimental and "one of the most interesting experiments ever attempted by a major director working with big box-office names",^[3] abandoning many standard film techniques to allow for the long unbroken scenes. Each shot ran continuously for up to ten minutes without interruption. It was shot on a single set, aside from the opening establishing shot street scene under the credits. Camera moves were planned in advance and there was almost no editing.

The walls of the set were on rollers and could silently be moved out of the way to make way for the camera, and then replaced when they were to come back into shot. Prop men also had to constantly move the furniture and other props out of the way of the large Technicolor camera, and then ensure they were replaced in the correct location. A team of soundmen and camera operators kept the camera and microphones in constant motion, as the actors kept to a carefully choreographed set of cues.^[1]

The extraordinary cyclorama in the background was the largest backing ever used on a sound stage.^[1] It included models of the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings. Numerous chimneys smoke, lights come on in buildings, neon signs light up, and the sunset slowly unfolds as the movie progressed. At about one hour into the film, a red neon sign in the far background showing Hitchcock's profile with "Reduco"—the fictitious weight loss product used in his Lifeboat (1944) cameo—is visible for just a moment. Within the course of the film, the clouds—made of spun glass—change position and shape a total of eight times.^[1]

Long takes

Hitchcock shot for periods lasting up to ten minutes (the length of a film camera magazine), continuously panning from actor to actor, though most shots in the film wound up being shorter.^[4] Every other segment ends by panning against or tracking into an object--a man’s jacket blocking the entire screen, or the back of a piece of furniture, for example. In this way, Hitchcock effectively masked half the cuts in the film.

However, at the end of 20 minutes (two reels), the projectionist—when the film was shown in theaters—had to change reels, and on these, Hitchcock cuts to a new camera setup, deliberately not disguising the cut. A description of the beginning and end of each segment follows.

film’s trailer

Hitchcock told François Truffaut in the book-length Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon & Schuster, 1967) that he ended up re-shooting the last four or five segments because he was dissatisfied with the color of the sunset.

Hitchcock used this long-take approach again to a lesser extent on his next film, Under Capricorn (1949) and in a very limited way in his film Stage Fright (1950).

Director's cameo

Hitchcock's cameo appearance as a red neon sign, in the far distance, with his famous profile above the word "Reduco", a fictitious weight-loss product

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In this film, Hitchcock is considered by some to make two appearances,^[5] according to Arthur Laurents in the documentary Rope Unleashed, available on the DVD. Laurents says that Hitchcock is a man walking down a Manhattan street in the opening scene, immediately after the title sequence.

Later on in the film, Hitchcock’s caricature is on a red neon sign visible from the apartment window (at about 00:55 into the film as Janet and Kenneth leave the living room for the last time). Below his caricature is the word "Reduco",^[6] recalling Hitch’s cameo in a newspaper ad for "Reduco" in Lifeboat, made four years before.

Themes

Homoeroticism

Even though homosexuality was a highly controversial theme for the 1940s, the movie made it past the Production Code censors; during the film's production, those involved described homosexuality as "it".^[2] However, many towns chose to ban it independently, memories of Leopold and Loeb still being fresh in some people’s minds. Dall was actually gay in real life, as was screenwriter Arthur Laurents — even the piano score played by Granger (Mouvement Perpétuel No. 1 by Francis Poulenc) was the work of a gay composer. Granger, meanwhile, was bisexual.^[7] Granger’s role was first offered to another bisexual actor, Montgomery Clift, who turned it down, probably due to the risks of coming out in public.^[1] Cary Grant turned down the part of Rupert Cadell for similar reasons.^[1]

John Dall and Farley Granger from the film’s trailer

Critic Robin Wood points to several instances in the film that could be interpreted as homoerotic. He suggests the opening strangulation reflects the euphoria of an orgasm and the subsequent limpness; and Wood sees masturbatory overtones to the scene in which Brandon excitedly fingers the neck of a champagne bottle (353).^[8]

The fact that the two characters were inspired by Leopold and Loeb, who some speculated were homosexual, only furthers the argument that Brandon and Philip were meant to be gay as well.^[9]

Nietzsche

The film is based on the idea that one might murder someone just to prove that one could. Some film scholarship has found links between this idea and literature and philosophy. Suggestions have been made that Crime and Punishment and its protagonist Raskolnikov form a subtext to the film — whereby the film parallels the idea of murdering just for the sake of performing the act (the term "Crime and Punishment" is used by Granger in the film). References to Nietzsche abound throughout the film, particularly to his idea of the superman.

Reception

In 1948, Variety magazine said "Hitchcock could have chosen a more entertaining subject with which to use the arresting camera and staging technique displayed in Rope".^[10] That same year, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times said the "novelty of the picture is not in the drama itself, it being a plainly deliberate and rather thin exercise in suspense, but merely in the method which Mr. Hitchcock has used to stretch the intended tension for the length of the little stunt" for a "story of meager range".^[11] Nearly 36 years later, Vincent Canby, also of The New York Times, called the "seldom seen" and "underrated" film "full of the kind of self-conscious epigrams and breezy ripostes that once defined wit and decadence in the Broadway theater"; it's a film "less concerned with the characters and their moral dilemmas than with how they look, sound and move, and with the overall spectacle of how a perfect crime goes wrong".^[12]

In the Time magazine 1948 review , the play that the film was based on is called an "intelligent and hideously exciting melodrama" though "in turning it into a movie for mass distribution, much of the edge [is] blunted":^[13]

Much of the play's deadly excitement dwelt in [the] juxtaposition of callow brilliance and lavender dandyism with moral idiocy and brutal horror. Much of its intensity came from the shocking change in the teacher, once he learned what was going on. In the movie, the boys and their teacher are shrewdly plausible but much more conventional types. Even so, the basic idea is so good and, in its diluted way, Rope is so well done that it makes a rattling good melodrama.

Roger Ebert wrote in 1984, "Alfred Hitchcock called Rope an 'experiment that didn’t work out', and he was happy to see it kept out of release for most of three decades. He was correct that it didn’t work out, but Rope remains one of the most interesting experiments ever attempted by a major director working with big box-office names, and it’s worth seeing [...]".^[3]

A 2001 BBC review of that year's DVD release called the film "technically and socially bold" and points out that given "how primitive the Technicolor process was back then", the DVD's image quality is "by those standards quite astonishing"; the release's "2.0 mono mix" was clear and reasonably strong, though "distortion creeps into the music".^[14]

Although the film was made during a period where reference to homosexuality was prohibited by the Production Code, more recent reviews and criticism explicitly note the homosexual subtext of the relationship between Brandon and Phillip.^[12][15]

Film rights

The rights to the film are now owned by Universal Studios, which bought the rights from the Hitchcock estate in 1983. The rights had reverted to the Hitchcock estate from United Artists, which at that time held rights to the pre-1950 Warner Bros. films (and the 1956 film Moby Dick which UA continues to own today).^[16][17] At present, UA continues to hold the film's copyright.

See also

• Psychoville, a 2009 BBC2 comedy series. Episode four of the series is a deliberate two-take pastiche of Rope.
• R.S.V.P., a 2002 film which borrowed several key elements from Rope, and in which the film is discussed.

References

Further reading

External links

• Rope at the Internet Movie Database
• Rope at the TCM Movie Database
• Rope at Allmovie
• Rope at Rotten Tomatoes
• Rope at Eyegate Gallery