Review of Rope (1948) by Mahmoud Y — 05 Apr 2011

John Dall and Farley Granger play a couple of homosexual playboys who, convinced of their own intellectual superiority, decide to commit the perfect murder (of a friend they consider to be an "inferior" specimen) then host a dinner party where the buffet is served on a wooden chest containing the dead man's body.

This film is not often rated as being one of Hitch's best, possibly because it concerns two gay men espousing Nietzschean ideas which must have been especially unpalatable just three years after the end of the Second World War - at the time of it's release it received a decidedly lukewarm reception.

Although the two main character's sexuality is never referred to in the film due to the prevailing Production Code of the time, the viewer is left in no doubt about it. Way ahead of it's time in terms of it's themes and also fearlessly experimental: Hitch wanted the film to play out in "real time" over the course of an evening, and also to appear as if it had been filmed in one continuous shot.

Hitch used long takes of around 10 minutes (the length of one reel of film) cleverly cut together to achieve this effect. Essentially it's a film of a play but a play with a most extraordinary set: a penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan, with drifting clouds (of spun glass) outside the windows, where the walls have to move to accommodate the cameras and crew.

The lighting technicians on this film merit a special mention of their own - the way in which the sun sets on Manhattan and gives the apartment an eerie glow stays with you long after the end of the film.

Ultimately though, the success of such a theatrical piece must depend on the quality of the actors and they are all quite brilliant. Dall and the recently departed Farley Granger find just the right mix of youthful arrogance and conceit and unworldly naivety; James Stewart, although some critics have said he was miscast, is perfect in his role as Dall and Granger's former tutor who is horrified to discover that his notions of murder as an art form have been taken so literally.

Constance Collier excels as that Hitch staple, the batty old woman, in this case a fortune teller who informs Farley Granger's character that his hands will become famous. She doesn't know that he's strangled her nephew.