Review of Rope (1948) by Liam D — 14 Dec 2011

Rope is a movie like literally almost no other. This was the classic suspense master Alfred Hitchcock at his most experimental: the movie is designed to look as if it were shot in one continuous take, all 85 minutes of it. It's actually not, but it does come awfully close to pulling off the illusion perfectly. Plus, it's a neat little story about murder, and it's got Jimmy Stewart in it. What else do you need?

The story, loosely based on the famous Leopold and Loeb murder case, in which a couple of bright young students, influenced by Nietzsche's ubermensch theories, decided to murder another young man purely for the thrill of it. This movie opens with the two committing the murder, after which they hide the corpse in a chest and proceed to have a dinner party with the victim's unwitting family and friends with the chest right there in the middle of the living room. Like every Hitchcock movie, this one is great at generating suspense.

Though Jimmy Stewart gets top billing for the movie, because he's Jimmy Stewart, the real stars are John Dall and Farley Granger as the murderers. Dall is deliciously arch and wicked as the more confident of the two murderers and the clear instigator. Farley Granger manages to make his frightened, nervous, weaker murderer very compelling and as sympathetic as a murderer can be. There's also a homosexual subtext to their characters that's quite unusual for 1948. Stewart plays the teacher who taught the boys the theories that inspired them to murder, and he was as dependably good as ever, though maybe a little miscast, actually. Constance Collier, kind of a Margaret-Dumont-type, is very funny as the victim's mother.

Of course, the real star of every Alfred Hitchcock movie is Alfred Hitchcock, and this really was one of his most elaborate and interesting directorial performances. The movie never ever leaves the apartment, and the camera moves around constantly in ways that are very efficient for the storytelling. Occasionally Hitchcock zooms in really close on someone's back or an inanimate object in order to be able to edit invisibly, and there are actually about 2 or 3 plainly visible cuts. But the overall effect of the elaborate camerawork is actually not to call attention to its own cleverness, but rather to immerse you thoroughly in the story. The movie was based on a play, and you do get the same sort of feeling of directness and temporal consistency watching it that you get at a live play. Though this movie doesn't quite have the dramatic impact of Rear Window or the shock value of Psycho, it's definitely a full-fledged Hitchcock classic.