Rope (film)

Rope
Original theatrical poster.
Directed by	Alfred Hitchcock
Produced by	Alfred Hitchcock Uncredited: Sidney Bernstein[citation needed]
Written by	Play: Patrick Hamilton Adaptation: Hume Cronyn Screenplay: Arthur Laurents Uncredited: Ben Hecht[citation needed]
Starring	James Stewart John Dall Farley Granger Cedric Hardwicke Constance Collier
Music by	David Buttolph Francis Poulenc
Cinematography	William V. Skall Joseph A. Valentine
Editing by	William H. Ziegler
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	August 23, 1948
Running time	81 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	US$ 1,500,000[citation needed]

Rope is a 1948 film written by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and 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.

The film was based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton, which was said to be inspired by the real-life murder of a young boy in 1924 by two University of Chicago students named Leopold and Loeb.

Plot

On a late afternoon, Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) strangle a former classmate, David Kentley (Dick Hogan), in Brandon's apartment. The senseless murder was inspired years earlier by conversations with their prep school housemaster, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart). While at school, Rupert had discussed with them, in an apparently approving way, the intellectual concepts of the Übermensch and the art of murder, a means of showing one's superiority over others.

The two hide the body in a large antique wooden chest, a chest that Brandon decides to use as a buffet for that evening's dinner party, a party to which David had been invited. The others guests are the victim’s father (Cedric Hardwicke) and aunt (Constance Collier), his fiancee, Janet Walker (Joan Chandler) and Walker's former lover Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick), who was once a close friend of David's. Rupert Cadell also turns up since Brandon feels that he would very likely approve of their so-called work of art. "Now the fun begins," Brandon says when the first of the guests arrives.

James Stewart from the film’s trailer.

Much of the conversation soon focuses on David and his unexplained absence. Soon after Rupert arrives, he begins to grow suspicious, prompted by a fidgety Phillip and other clues. When the victim’s mother calls, overwrought because she has not heard a word from David herself, Mr. Kentley decides to leave. He takes with him some books Brandon has given him, tied together with the rope Brandon and Phillip used to strangle his son.

About to leave, Rupert is handed another man’s hat by mistake. In it he sees the initials "D.K." (as in David Kentley). Now certain something is wrong, Rupert returns to the apartment a short while after everyone else has departed, pretending that he has 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 can't stand 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 committed murder. He is horrified, but also deeply ashamed since it was his own rhetoric which led them to carry out an actual killing as an intellectual exercise.

Rupert seizes Brandon’s gun and fires several shots into the night. As the sky outside the apartment darkens into night, we hear the sirens of police cars, attracted by the shots, heading their way.

Production

John Dall, Farley Granger and James Stewart.

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"^[1], 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. 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 Technocolor 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.^{[citation needed]}

The extraordinary cyclorama in the background was the largest backing ever used on a sound stage.^{[citation needed]} 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. Within the course of the film , the clouds, made of spun glass, change position and shape a total of eight times.^{[citation needed]}

Long takes

Hitchcock filmed each scene in segments lasting up to ten minutes (the length of a reel of film at the time), each segment continuously panning from character to character in real time. Several segments end by panning against or zooming into an object (a man’s jacket, or the back of a piece of furniture, for example) or by having an actor move in front of the camera, blocking the entire screen; each scene after that starts a static shot of that same object. In this way Hitchcock effectively masked many of the cuts in the film. A description of the beginning and end of each segment follows.

film’s trailer.

Hitchcock ended up re-shooting the last four or five segments because he was dissatisfied with the colour of the sunset.^{[citation needed]}

Hitchcock used this long-take approach again on his next film, Under Capricorn.

Director's cameo

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In this film, Hitchcock is thought by some to make two appearances.^[2] In the opening scene some feel he plays one of the men walking down the street. Later on in the film, Hitchcock’s caricature is on a neon sign visible from the apartment window. Below his caricature is the word "Reduco," recalling Hitch’s cameo in a newspaper ad for "Reduco" in Lifeboat, made four years before.

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" ^[3] 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".^[4] 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."^[5]

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":^[6]

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 [...]."^[1]

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."^[7]

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.^[5][8]

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-1948 Warner Bros. films. At present, UA continues to hold the film's copyright.

See also

• 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

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Rope (film)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Rope

• Rope at the TCM Movie Database.
• Rope at Rotten Tomatoes.
• Rope Eyegate Gallery
• Review of Rope

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