Rope (film)
Encyclopedia
Rope is a 1948
1948 in film
The year 1948 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* Laurence Olivier's Hamlet becomes the first British film to win the American Academy Award for Best Picture.-Top grossing films : After theatrical re-issue- Awards :...

 American thriller film based on the play Rope
Rope (play)
Rope is a 1929 British play by Patrick Hamilton. In formal terms, it is a well-made play with a three-act dramatic structure that adheres to the classical unities. Its action is continuous, punctuated only by the curtain fall at the end of each act. It may also be considered a thriller whose...

(1929) by Patrick Hamilton
Patrick Hamilton (dramatist)
Patrick Hamilton was an English playwright and novelist.He was well regarded by Graham Greene and J. B. Priestley and study of his novels has been revived recently because of their distinctive style, deploying a Dickensian narrative voice to convey aspects of inter-war London street culture...

 and adapted by Hume Cronyn
Hume Cronyn
Hume Blake Cronyn, OC was a Canadian actor of stage and screen, who enjoyed a long career, often appearing professionally alongside his second wife, Jessica Tandy.-Early life:...

 (treatment
Film treatment
A film treatment is a piece of prose, typically the step between scene cards and the first draft of a screenplay for a motion picture, television program, or radio play. It is generally longer and more detailed than an outline , and it may include details of directorial style that an outline omits...

) and Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S...

, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...

 and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures
Transatlantic Pictures
Transatlantic Pictures was founded by Alfred Hitchcock and longtime associate Sidney Bernstein at the end of World War II in preparation for the end of Hitchcock's contract with David O. Selznick in 1947...

 productions. Starring James Stewart
James Stewart
James Stewart was a Hollywood movie actor and USAF brigadier general.James Stewart may also refer to:-Noblemen:*James Stewart, 5th High Steward of Scotland*James Stewart, the Black Knight of Lorn James Stewart (1908–1997) was a Hollywood movie actor and USAF brigadier general.James Stewart...

, John Dall
John Dall
John Dall was an American actor.Primarily a stage actor, he is best remembered today for two film roles; the cool-minded intellectual killer in Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope, and the trigger-happy lead in the 1950 noir Gun Crazy.He first came to fame as the young prodigy who comes alive under the...

 and Farley Granger
Farley Granger
Farley Earle Granger was an American actor. In a career spanning several decades, he was perhaps best known for his two collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Rope in 1948 and Strangers on a Train in 1951.-Early life:...

, it is the first of Hitchcock's Technicolor
Technicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...

 films, and is notable for taking place in real time and being edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot
Shot (film)
In film, a shot is a continuous strip of motion picture film, created of a series of frames, that runs for an uninterrupted period of time. Shots are generally filmed with a single camera and can be of any duration. A shot in production, defined by the beginning and end of a capturing process, is...

 through the use of long take
Long take
A long take is an uninterrupted shot in a film which lasts much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general, usually lasting several minutes. It can be used for dramatic and narrative effect if done properly, and in moving shots is often accomplished...

s.

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
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb
Leopold and Loeb
Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb , more commonly known as "Leopold and Loeb", were two wealthy University of Michigan alumni and University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 and were sentenced to life imprisonment.The duo were...

.

Plot

On a late afternoon, two brilliant young aesthetes, Brandon Shaw (Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Granger), murder a former classmate, David Kentley (Dick Hogan), by strangulation 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
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

's skyline. The guests, unaware of what has happened, include the victim's father Mr. Kentley (Cedric Hardwicke
Cedric Hardwicke
Sir Cedric Webster Hardwicke was a noted English stage and film actor whose career spanned nearly fifty years...

) and aunt Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier
Constance Collier
Constance Collier was an English film actress and acting coach.-Life and career:Born Laura Constance Hardie, in Windsor, Berkshire, Collier made her stage debut at the age of 3, when she played Fairy Peasblossom in A Midsummer's Night Dream...

) (his mother is not able to attend). Also there is his fiancee, Janet Walker (Joan Chandler
Joan Chandler
Joan Chandler was an American actress who starred in several movies during the 1940s and 1950s, most notably Rope with James Stewart and Humoresque with Joan Crawford....

) and her former lover Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick
Douglas Dick
Douglas Dick is a retired American actor.- Career :Douglas Dick is best known for his role as Carl Herrick in the TV series Waterfront , and as Kenneth Lawrence in the Alfred Hitchcock film Rope .He was married to Ronnie Cowan until their 1960 divorce, and to television screenwriter Peggy Chantler...

), who was once David's close friend.

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
Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche developed his philosophy during the late 19th century amid growing criticism of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophic system.Nietzsche owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and admitted that Schopenhauer was...

's Übermensch
Übermensch
The Übermensch is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche posited the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra ....

 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 great fame. She is referring to his skill at the piano, but he appears to think that the "fame" will in fact be the notoriety gained from being caught.

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 increase the tension by playing matchmaker between Janet and Kenneth.

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 attention. The films segues to the end titles with the sound of approaching police sirens.

Cast

  • James Stewart
    James Stewart
    James Stewart was a Hollywood movie actor and USAF brigadier general.James Stewart may also refer to:-Noblemen:*James Stewart, 5th High Steward of Scotland*James Stewart, the Black Knight of Lorn James Stewart (1908–1997) was a Hollywood movie actor and USAF brigadier general.James Stewart...

     as Rupert Cadell, prep-school housemaster and publisher
  • John Dall
    John Dall
    John Dall was an American actor.Primarily a stage actor, he is best remembered today for two film roles; the cool-minded intellectual killer in Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope, and the trigger-happy lead in the 1950 noir Gun Crazy.He first came to fame as the young prodigy who comes alive under the...

     as Brandon Shaw, co-murderer and host at the party
  • Farley Granger
    Farley Granger
    Farley Earle Granger was an American actor. In a career spanning several decades, he was perhaps best known for his two collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Rope in 1948 and Strangers on a Train in 1951.-Early life:...

     as Phillip Morgan, co-murderer
  • Douglas Dick
    Douglas Dick
    Douglas Dick is a retired American actor.- Career :Douglas Dick is best known for his role as Carl Herrick in the TV series Waterfront , and as Kenneth Lawrence in the Alfred Hitchcock film Rope .He was married to Ronnie Cowan until their 1960 divorce, and to television screenwriter Peggy Chantler...

     as Kenneth Lawrence
  • Joan Chandler
    Joan Chandler
    Joan Chandler was an American actress who starred in several movies during the 1940s and 1950s, most notably Rope with James Stewart and Humoresque with Joan Crawford....

     as Janet Walker, columnist and David's fiancee
  • Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Mr. Henry Kentley, David's father
  • Constance Collier
    Constance Collier
    Constance Collier was an English film actress and acting coach.-Life and career:Born Laura Constance Hardie, in Windsor, Berkshire, Collier made her stage debut at the age of 3, when she played Fairy Peasblossom in A Midsummer's Night Dream...

     as Mrs. Anita Atwater, David's aunt
  • Edith Evanson
    Edith Evanson
    Edith Evanson was an American film actress.-Career:Her first film role came in The Man Who Wouldn't Talk in an uncredited role. In the 1940s she was in supporting roles mostly as a maid, a busybody, landladies, or middle-aged secretaries...

     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", 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
Establishing shot
An establishing shot in filmmaking and television production sets up, or establishes the context for a scene by showing the relationship between its important figures and objects...

 street scene under the credits. Camera moves were carefully planned 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 constantly had to move the furniture and other props out of the way of the large Technicolor
Technicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...

 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.

The extraordinary cyclorama
Cyclorama (theater)
A cyclorama is a large curtain or wall, often concave, positioned at the back of the stage area. It was popularized in the German theater of the 19th century and continues in common usage today in theaters throughout the world...

 in the background was the largest backing ever used on a sound stage
Sound stage
In common usage, a sound stage is a soundproof, hangar-like structure, building, or room, used for the production of theatrical filmmaking and television production, usually located on a secure movie studio property.-Overview:...

. It included models of the Empire State
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building is a 102-story landmark skyscraper and American cultural icon in New York City at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet , and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 ft high. Its name is derived...

 and the Chrysler
Chrysler Building
The Chrysler Building is an Art Deco style skyscraper in New York City, located on the east side of Manhattan in the Turtle Bay area at the intersection of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue. Standing at , it was the world's tallest building for 11 months before it was surpassed by the Empire State...

 buildings. Numerous chimneys smoke, lights come on in buildings, neon signs light up, and the sunset slowly unfolds as the movie progressed. At about fifty-three minutes into the film, a red neon sign in the far background showing Hitchcock's profile with "Reduco"—the fictitious weight loss product
Weight loss
Weight loss, in the context of medicine, health or physical fitness, is a reduction of the total body mass, due to a mean loss of fluid, body fat or adipose tissue and/or lean mass, namely bone mineral deposits, muscle, tendon and other connective tissue...

 used in his Lifeboat
Lifeboat (film)
Lifeboat is an American war film directed by Alfred Hitchcock from a story written by John Steinbeck. The film stars Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Mary Anderson, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Heather Angel, Hume Cronyn and Canada Lee, and is set entirely on a lifeboat.The film is...

(1944) cameo— starts blinking; as the guests are escorted to the door actors Joan Chandler and Douglas Dick stop to have a few words, the sign appears and disappears in the background several times, right between their visages, right under the eyes of the spectators this is by far the subtlest of all Hitchcock's "cameos". Within the course of the film the clouds—made of spun glass
Fiberglass
Glass fiber is a material consisting of numerous extremely fine fibers of glass.Glassmakers throughout history have experimented with glass fibers, but mass manufacture of glass fiber was only made possible with the invention of finer machine tooling...

—change position and shape eight times.

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. 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 magazines of film make one reel of film on the projector in the movie theater), the projectionist—when the film was shown in theaters—had to change reels. On these changeovers, Hitchcock cuts to a new camera setup, deliberately not disguising the cut. A description of the beginning and end of each segment follows.

Segment Length Time-Code Start Finish
1 09:34 00:02:30 CU (Close-Up), strangulation Blackout on Brandon's back
2 07:51 00:11:59 Black, pan off Brandon's back CU Kenneth: "What do you mean?"
3 07:18 00:19:45 Unmasked cut, men crossing to Janet Blackout on Kenneth's back
4 07:08 00:27:15 Black, pan off Kenneth's back CU Phillip: "That's a lie."
5 09:57 00:34:34 Unmasked cut, CU Rupert Blackout on Brandon's back
6 07:33 00:44:21 Black, pan off Brandon's back Three shot
7 07:46 00:51:56 Unmasked cut, Mrs. Wilson: "Excuse me, sir." Blackout on Brandon
8 10:06 00:59:44 Black, pan off Brandon CU Brandon's hand in gun pocket
9 04:37 01:09:51 Unmasked cut, CU Rupert Blackout on lid of chest
10 05:38 01:14:35 Black, pan up from lid of chest End of film


Hitchcock told François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...

 in the book-length Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...

, 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
Under Capricorn
Under Capricorn is an Alfred Hitchcock historical feature film.-Production:The film is based on the novel Under Capricorn by Helen Simpson, with screenplay by James Bridie, and adaptation by Hume Cronyn. The movie was co-produced by Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein for their short-lived production...

(1949) and in a very limited way in his film Stage Fright
Stage Fright (film)
Stage Fright is a 1950 British crime film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock starring Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding and Richard Todd...

(1950).

Director's cameo

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, 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
Title sequence
A Title Sequence is the method by which cinematic films or television programs present their title, key production and cast members, or both, utilizing conceptual visuals and sound...

.

Later on in the film, Hitchcock's caricature
Caricature
A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...

 is on a red neon sign
Neon sign
Neon signs are made using electrified, luminous tube lights that contain rarefied neon or other gases. They are the most common use for neon lighting, which was first demonstrated in a modern form in December, 1910 by Georges Claude at the Paris Motor Show. While they are used worldwide, neon signs...

 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", recalling his cameo in a newspaper ad for "Reduco" in Lifeboat
Lifeboat (film)
Lifeboat is an American war film directed by Alfred Hitchcock from a story written by John Steinbeck. The film stars Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Mary Anderson, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Heather Angel, Hume Cronyn and Canada Lee, and is set entirely on a lifeboat.The film is...

, made four years before.

Homosexual Hints

Even though homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...

 was a highly controversial theme for the 1940s, the movie made it past the Production Code
Production Code
The Motion Picture Production Code was the set of industry moral censorship guidelines that governed the production of the vast majority of United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1930 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Hollywood's chief censor of the...

 censors; during the film's production, those involved described homosexuality as "it". However, many towns chose to ban it independently, memories of Leopold and Loeb
Leopold and Loeb
Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb , more commonly known as "Leopold and Loeb", were two wealthy University of Michigan alumni and University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 and were sentenced to life imprisonment.The duo were...

 still being fresh in some people's minds. Dall was actually gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

 in real life, as was screenwriter Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S...

 — even the piano score played by Granger (Mouvement Perpétuel No. 1 by Francis Poulenc
Francis Poulenc
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...

) was the work of a gay composer. Granger, meanwhile, was bisexual.

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.

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
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. This is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his...

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
Übermensch
The Übermensch is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche posited the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra ....

.

Reception

In 1948, Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

magazine said "Hitchcock could have chosen a more entertaining subject with which to use the arresting camera and staging technique displayed in Rope". That same year, Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther was a journalist and author who was film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His reviews and articles helped shape the careers of actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were unnecessarily mean...

 of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

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". Nearly 36 years later, Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...

, also of The New York Times, called the "seldom seen" and "underrated" film "full of the kind of self-conscious epigram
Epigram
An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising statement. Derived from the epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on inscribe", this literary device has been employed for over two millennia....

s 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
Perfect crime
Perfect crime is a colloquial term used in law and fiction to characterize crimes that are undetected, unattributed to a perpetrator, or else unsolved as a kind of technical achievement on the part of the perpetrator....

 goes wrong".

In the Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

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":
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
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

 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, but went on to say that "'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 [...]".

A 2001 BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 review of that year's DVD release called the film "technically and socially bold" and pointed 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".

In his article "Remembering When", Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he heads USC's Brain and Creativity Institute and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute. Prior to taking up his posts at USC, in 2005, Damasio was M.W...

 argues that the time frame covered by the movie, which lasts 80 minutes and is supposed to be in "real time", is actually longer - a little more than 100 minutes. This, he states, is accomplished by speeding up the action: the formal dinner lasts only 20 minutes, the sun sets too quickly and so on.

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
Subtext
Subtext or undertone is content of a book, play, musical work, film, video game, or television series which is not announced explicitly by the characters but is implicit or becomes something understood by the observer of the work as the production unfolds. Subtext can also refer to the thoughts...

 of the relationship between Brandon and Phillip.

Film rights

The original distributor of Rope was Warner Bros. as part of their distribution deal with Transatlantic Pictures
Transatlantic Pictures
Transatlantic Pictures was founded by Alfred Hitchcock and longtime associate Sidney Bernstein at the end of World War II in preparation for the end of Hitchcock's contract with David O. Selznick in 1947...

. In his 1967 book-length interview Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock said that MGM had acquired the rights and was planning to re-release it. The film was out of distribution from roughly 1968 to 1983. Transatlantic originally owned the film's copyright, which was renewed by United Artists Television
United Artists Television
-Background:UA purchased Associated Artists Productions in 1958, giving UA access to the pre-1950 Warner Bros. library and the Popeye cartoons made by Fleischer Studios and Famous Studios between 1933 and 1957....

 (UATV) in 1975.

The rights had reverted to the Hitchcock estate from UATV, which at that time held rights to the pre-1950 Warner Bros. films. The film was re-released in October 1983 by Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....

, along with other Hitchcock films that were originally out of circulation for years: Rear Window
Rear Window
Rear Window is a 1954 American suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by John Michael Hayes and based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder"...

, Vertigo
Vertigo (film)
Vertigo is a 1958 psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A...

, The Man Who Knew Too Much
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 film)
The Man Who Knew Too Much is a suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring James Stewart and Doris Day. The film is a remake in widescreen VistaVision and Technicolor of Hitchcock's 1934 film of the same name....

, and The Trouble With Harry
The Trouble with Harry
The Trouble With Harry is a 1955 American black comedy film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the novel of the same name by Jack Trevor Story. It was released in the United States on October 3, 1955 then rereleased once the distribution rights were acquired by Universal Pictures in 1984...

. Home video releases still list UATV as the copyright holder.

Novelization

A novelization of the film was released by Dell Publishing
Dell Publishing
Dell Publishing, an American publisher of books, magazines and comic books, was founded in 1921 by George T. Delacorte, Jr.During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Dell was one of the largest publishers of magazines, including pulp magazines. Their line of humor magazines included 1000 Jokes, launched in...

 in 1948. Alfred Hitchcock is credited as the author.

See also

  • Psychoville
    Psychoville
    Psychoville is an award-winning British dark comedy television serial written by and starring The League of Gentlemen members Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. It debuted on BBC Two on 18 June 2009. Pemberton and Shearsmith each play numerous characters, with Dawn French and Jason Tompkins in...

    , a 2009 BBC2 comedy series. Episode four of the series is a deliberate two-take pastiche of Rope.
  • R.S.V.P.
    R.S.V.P. (film)
    R.S.V.P. is a 2002 American horror film written and directed by Mark Anthony Galluzzo.The plot of this black comedy in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians is about the post-graduation party of a college student, obsessed with serial killers, during which...

    , a 2002 film which borrowed several key elements from Rope, and in which the film is discussed.
  • Swoon
    Swoon (film)
    Swoon is an independent film written and directed by Tom Kalin, released in 1992. It is an account of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case, focusing more on the homosexuality of the killers than other movies based on the case...

    , an independent 1992 film by Tom Kalin
    Tom Kalin
    Tom Kalin is an award-winning screenwriter, film director, producer, and professor of experimental film at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.His debut feature, Swoon, is considered an integral part of the New Queer Cinema...

    depicting the actual Leopold and Loeb events.

Further reading

  • Wollen, Peter. Rope: Three Hypotheses. Alfred Hitchcock Centenary Essays.


External links

  • Rope at Eyegate Gallery
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