Rope, Alfred Hitchcock's first color film, was adapted from Patrick Hamilton's stage play Rope's End by no less than Hume Cronyn. Loosely inspired by the Leopold-Loeb case, the plot concerns two implicitly homosexual college chums, played by Farley Granger and John Dall. Their heads filled with Nietzschean philosophy by their kindly professor James Stewart, Granger and Dall kill a third friend just for the thrill of it. The boys hide the body in an antique chest in the middle of their posh
apartment, then perversely arrange to hold a dinner party around the chest, inviting the victim's family, friends and fiancee (Joan Chandler), as well as their intellectual role-model Stewart. As the guests wander obliviously around the sealed chest, the killers make snippy, veiled comments about their deed--never going so far as to reveal the existence of the body nor their involvement in the murder. As all the guests file out, however, professor Stewart begins to suspect that something is amiss. In Rope, Hitchcock attempted the daunting technical challenge of filming the entire picture in one long, seemingly uninterrupted take. Actually, there are several edits in the movie: since a reel of film was divided into two ten-minute minireels back in 1948, the internal reel-breaks are "fudged" by having a dark object briefly obscure the camera lens, sustaining the illusion that no editing has taken place. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Apart from the tedium of waiting or someone to open that chest and discover the hidden body which the hosts have tucked away for the sake of a thrill, the unpunctuated flow of image becomes quite monotonous.
Rope is Hitchock's underrated classic that contains some of the most unique filmmaking of it's time. Hitchcock was so far ahead of filmmakers back then and so far ahead of a lot of the filmmakers today.
"A crime for most, a privilege for some" is how Rupert classifies murder, but Hitchcock's eye-am-a-camera technique in Rope is after more than Nazi-superman residue still lurking after WWII.
Hitchcock said it was a stunt, but Rope is a fascinating experiment trying to find the cinematic equivalent to a play, with the camera constantly searching
It's way too loosely based on the Leopold-Loeb case. But that doesn't make the movie any less interesting. I felt it a bit slow at the beginning, but soon I found myself enjoying the party. Hitchcock's touch of Psycho is apparent here. Or is it only me? One way or another, John Dall is incredibly superb as Brandon. The
dialogues are so well-written that they succeed to linger in your memory. The thrills and chills, accompanied with humor, were excellent, and it'd have made for a perfect murder had Hitchcock not stepped back on Rupert's character. That was the only disappointing factor in this otherwise perfect entertainer.ADD-IT: On watching again, I feel that I was wrong about Rupert. Taking some details into account, I feel that Rupert didn't really mean what he said. But then his response, "The humor was unintentional" to David father's interruption to their discussion about murder (saying that he did not appreciate the morbid humor) confuses me. His response towards the ending after finding out the reality wasn't convincing enough. Wish they'd a better climax in mind.
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