Rope (film)
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| Rope | |
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 Original Theatrical Poster |
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| Directed by | Alfred Hitchcock |
| Produced by | Alfred Hitchcock Uncredited: Sidney Bernstein |
| Written by | Play: Patrick Hamilton Adaptation: Hume Cronyn Screenplay: Arthur Laurents Uncredited: Ben Hecht |
| 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 |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Rope (1948) is an Alfred Hitchcock classic film notable for its single location, edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot, taking place in real time. It is the first of Hitchcock's films that was made in color.
The film was based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton, which was said to be in turn inspired by the real-life murder of a young boy in 1924 by two University of Chicago students named Leopold and Loeb. Hamilton, though, always denied the link between his play and the case.
Hitchcock was the producer and director of the film. Rope is the first movie for which Hitchcock received a credit as both producer and director (he was the uncredited producer on Number 13, Suspicion and Notorious). The rights to the film are now owned by Universal Studios, which bought the rights from United Artists (which at that time held rights to the pre-1948 Warner Bros. films) in 1983.
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[edit] Plot
On a late afternoon, two brilliant young aesthetes, Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) murder a former classmate, David Kentley (Dick Hogan), in their apartment. They then hide his body in a large antique wooden chest.
Brandon's and Phillip's idea for the murder was inspired years earlier by conversations with their erstwhile prep-school housemaster, publisher 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.
After committing the murder, Brandon and Phillip host a dinner party at the Shaw apartment which has a beautiful panoramic view of the city skyline (in what appears to be Manhattan). The guests include the victim’s father (Cedric Hardwicke) and aunt (Constance Collier) (his mother is not able to attend), as well as his fiancee, Janet Walker (Joan Chandler) and her former lover Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick), who was once a close friend of David's. The chest containing the body is used as a buffet for the food.
Rupert Cadell also turns up since Brandon in particular 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.
Brandon subtly drops hints throughout the party about David's absence, beginning a discussion on the art of murder. He manages to appear 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 fame, she is talking about his skill at the piano, but he appears to think that it will be a different kind of fame.
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 had personally seen Phillip strangle several.
Phillip later complains to Brandon about having had a "rotten evening", not because of the murder of David but over Rupert's questioning.
Emotions run high. David's father and fiancee are disturbed, wondering why he has neither arrived nor phoned. When his wife calls, over-emotional 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 very rope Brandon and Phillip used to kill Mr. Kentley's son; Brandon's icing on the cake.
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 accidentally left his cigarette case there. 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 in order to attract the police.
As the sky outside the apartment darkens into night, we hear the sirens of police cars heading their way.
[edit] Filming
The film is Hitchcock’s most experimental, 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 camera, and then ensure they were replaced in the correct location. A team of soundmen and camera operators kept the camera and mics in constant motion, as the actors kept to a carefully choreographed set of cues.
The extraordinary cyclorama in the background was the largest backing ever used on a sound stage. 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 nine reels, the cumulus clouds, which were made of spun glass, change position and shape a total of eight times.
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 technique that has frequently been used since to hide edits.
Although it is commonly believed that all the cuts in Rope are hidden, in fact, only half are. Another misconception is that all the shots last ten minutes. Actually, of the ten shots used for the film, only three approach or exceed the ten minute mark. Five of the shots range between seven and eight minutes, and the penultimate and final shots last only about four-and-a-half and five-and-a-half minutes, respectively. The average shot length in Rope is approximately 464.8 seconds (7 minutes, 45 seconds), giving it an average shot length second only to Russian Ark. A description of the beginning and end of each reel follows, with the approximate duration of the shot given in parentheses.
- R1 (9:34) CU strangulation to Blackout on Brandon’s back.
- R2 (7:51) Black, pan off Brandon’s back to CU Kenneth: “What do you mean?”
- R3 (7:18) Unmasked cut, men crossing to Janet to Blackout on Kenneth’s back.
- R4 (7:08) Black, pan off Kenneth’s back to CU Phillip: “That’s a lie.”
- R5 (9:57) Unmasked cut, CU Rupert to Blackout on Brandon’s back.
- R6 (7:33) Black, pan off Brandon’s back to Three shot.
- R7 (7:46) Unmasked cut, Mrs. Wilson: “Excuse me, sir.” to Blackout on Brandon.
- R8 (10:06) Black, pan off Brandon to CU Brandon’s hand in gun pocket.
- R9 (4:37) Unmasked cut, CU Rupert to Blackout on lid of chest.
- R10 (5:38) Black, pan up from lid of chest to End.
Hitchcock ended up re-shooting the last 4-5 segments because he was dissatisfied with the color of the sunset. He shot about one segment a day.
Hitchcock used this long-take approach again on his next film, Under Capricorn.
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In this film, Hitchcock makes two appearances[1]. In the opening scene 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.
[edit] Themes
[edit] Homoeroticism
Rope may be considered a homoerotic movie, even though the film version never indicates that the two murderers in the film were having an affair, and reference is made to one of them (Brandon) having previously been in a relationship with the fiancee of the murdered man. However, there is no indication that the two men live apart, Phillip even has a key of his own for the Shaw apartment, and towards the end of the movie they discuss going away together for a holiday.
Even though homosexuality was a highly controversial theme for the 1940s, the movie made it through censorship. However, many towns chose to ban it independently, memories of Leopold and Loeb still being fresh in some people’s minds[citation needed]. Dall was actually gay in real life, as was screenwriter Arthur Laurents — even the piano score played by Granger (Mouvement Perpétuel No. 1 by Francis Poulenc) was the work of a gay composer. Granger was bisexual. Granger’s role was first offered to a bisexual actor, Montgomery Clift, who turned the offer down, probably due to the risks of coming out in public[citation needed]. Cary Grant turned down the part of Rupert Cadell for similar reasons.
In Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, critic Robin Wood points to several instances in the film that could be interpreted as homoerotic. He suggests the opening strangulation reflects the euphoria of an orgasm and the subsequent limpness; and Wood sees masturbatory overtones to the scene in which Brandon excitedly fingers the neck of a champagne bottle.
In Hamilton’s play, the dialogue is much more homoerotic, as is the relationship between the students and their teacher. Many of these "risky" elements were removed from the script as the play was rewritten for the film, due to the censorship of the time. Despite this, Hitchcock managed to supply much subtext which made it past the rigorous tests of the censor.
One example is how Hitchcock makes plain the sexual nature of their relationship, as well as each character’s role, at the very start of the movie with the first lines of dialogue spoken. Directly after the murder, while both men are standing, Brandon wants to get moving to arrange the party — but Phillip, shocked and drained by what they have just done, asks if they can’t "just stay like this for a while." Brandon agrees, then lights a cigarette. This mirroring of post-sexual dialog is immediately identifiable, and also indicates that Phillip’s role in the relationship is that of the female submissive archetype, while Brandon’s is that of the dominant male.
Four other films, Compulsion, Swoon, Murder by Numbers and RSVP were also based on the Leopold and Loeb case.
[edit] Nietzsche
Much of 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 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. References to Nietzsche abound throughout the film — particularly to his idea of the superman.
[edit] See also
- R.S.V.P., a film which borrowed several key elements from Rope, and in which the film is discussed.
[edit] References
- Peter Wollen. Rope: Three Hypotheses. Alfred Hitchcock Centenary Essays.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Interview with Arthur Laurents in the making-of documentary, Rope Unleashed
[edit] External links
- Rope at the TCM Movie Database.
- Rope at Rotten Tomatoes.
- Review of Rope
- Rope Eyegate Gallery
- Alfred Hitchcock Wiki:Rope (1948)
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