Review of Rope (1948) by Gerardo R — 05 Aug 2013

You got to give Alfred Hitchcock credit for one aspect regarding his first Technicolor feature Rope (1948) and that is the honorable attempt at trying something different in terms of telling his story. With Rope, he tries to film the entire picture as if it were one seamlessly continuous take. Although I can clearly tell when the film may have been edited through close-ups of the backs of the character's suits, I at least respect what he's trying to attempt and that ambition alone is one of the best parts of this picture. The rest of Rope however, if you really think about it, is pretty boring especially by Hitchcock standards.

We start Rope with, no surprise, a murder which is committed by two college students. One of them (John Dall) has complete confidence that they have committed the perfect crime, the other (Farley Granger) does not and becomes rather nervous. Other than the fact that they've committed a crime, why is Granger so nervous? Because Dall had the very head-strong idea to invite the victim's family, their friends, and a detective (James Stewart) over for a dinner party to basically make sure their crime is basically untraceable. Yeah, no wonder Granger is so nervous. One might be so wise as to say this is a very unwise idea and that this effectively proves why pride is a sin in a scenario like this.

As you can probably tell, the story of Rope, while efficiently told at a running time of less than an hour and a half, is not really that interesting or groundbreaking. Hitchcock has basically told this type of story many times before and there's no real twists to this one to really make it stand out. Because there's no surprises, you can easily predict where the plot will go and you'd probably be right.

The characters in this film are also pretty lame with the exception of James Stewart since he recognizes how unpleasant this dinner party seems to be. There's nothing really wrong with these people, but I just don't find much in these characters that make them very memorable. They all just deliver whatever lines they have to say and just get off screen as soon as possible. Some of the conversations the characters have are relatively pointless, there's one conversation where they're talking about movie stars that immediately becomes distracting.

Once again, the only aspects about Rope that seem to work are its underlying ambition to make everything on screen feel like it's happening in real-time and James Stewart's performance. Aside from that, there isn't much here that will truly satisfy fans of Alfred Hitchcock. Maybe if its story had more plot turns or drama, I would be more impressed with the style Hitchcock was trying to go for here. As it is, Rope is an experiment that tries something new, but ultimately seldom delivers on its early promise.