1948 Thriller
- • US • Colour • 76mins •
- James Stewart Rupert Cadell
- John Dall John Brandon
- Farley Granger Philip Morgan
- Cedric Hardwicke Mr Kentley
- Constance Collier Mrs Atwater
- Joan Chandler Janet Walker
- Dir:
- Prod:
- Hitchcock, Sidney Bernstein
- Scr:
- Arthur Laurents, Hume Cronyn, Ben Hecht (uncredited), from the play by Patrick Hamilton
- Ph:
- Joseph Valentine, William V. Skall
- Ed:
- William H. Ziegler
- Mus:
- David Buttolph
- Art Dir:
- Perry Ferguson
- (Transatlantic)
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[ r o p e : m o v i e r e v i e w ]
Rated: 
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Hitchcock could have chosen a more entertaining subject with which to use the arresting camera and staging technique displayed
in Rope. Theme is of a thrill murder, done for
no reason but to satisfy a sadistical urge and
intellectual vanity. Plot has its real-life counterpart in the infamous Loeb-Leopold case,
and is based on the play by Patrick Hamilton
[adapted by Hume Cronyn]. Hitch places his his pair of homosexual student murderers (Farley Granger, John Dall) in a fashionable New York apartment.
Feature of the picture is that story action is continuous without time lapses. Action takes place within an hour-and-a-half period and the film footage nearly duplicates the span, being 80 minutes. It is entirely confined to the murder apartment of two male dilettantes, intellectual morons who commit what they believe to be the perfect crime, then celebrate the deed with a ghoulish supper served to the victim's relatives and friends from atop the chest in which the body is concealed.
To achieve his effects, Hitchcock put his cast and technicians through lengthy rehearsals before turning a camera.
James Stewart, as the ex-professor who first senses the guilt of his former pupils and nibbles away at their composure with verbal barbs, does a commanding job. John Dall stands out as the egocentric who masterminds the killing and ghoulish wake. Equally good is Farley Granger as the weakling partner in crime.
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In retrospect, the most surprising thing about Rope is that James Stewart and
Alfred Hitchcock were ever eager to work with one another again after
its completion. When the director wasn't giving short shrift to the actor
and the rest of the cast in his enthrallment with what he viewed as a
technical innovation, the leading man was making it evident that he
didn't think all that much of the picture, thought himself miscast, and
detested the preoccupation with technical trickery. If they agreed on
anything, it was in the opinion often voiced in subsequent years that the
filmization of the Patrick Hamilton play was not particularly good.
The Hamilton play was inspired by the Leopold-Loeb case, in which a
pair of educated young men in Chicago in the 1920s committed a
random murder for the thrill of it and to demonstrate their superiority to
society. Confining itself to eighty minutes of "real action" time, the
mostly faithful Hitchcock adaptation shows the two killers Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger) as they host a cocktail party while the body of their victim reposes in a chest being used as a serving
table in their living room. The party guests in the single-set drama
include the father (Cedric Hardwicke) and the aunt (Constance
Collier) of the dead man, his fiancee (Joan Chandler), and, most important, the one-time school housemaster and now publisher (Stewart)
whose Nietzschean spoutings in the past lighted the fuse for the killing in
the minds of Brandon and and Philip . In a cat-and-mouse game with the
killers, the publisher bores small, large, and larger holes in their sangfroid
until he reveals the truth and, denying that his ideas were ever meant to
justify homicide, summons the police.
Rope's numerous problems started with the casting. As originally planned by Hitchcock, the film would have starred Cary Grant in the
role of the publisher and Montgomery Clift as Brandon. But the
established homosexual relationship between Leopold and Loeb, and the
tacit recognition of a similar tie between Hamilton's killers, persuaded
the bisexual Grant and the gay Clift to steer clear of the project to avoid
long-term commercial repercussions. As he would go to the actor in the
1950s to soften various neuroses of his protagonists, Hitchcock then
opted for Stewart, overcoming the actor's doubts about being right for
the part with the help of an offer of $300,000 for a production whose
entire budget was merely $1.5 million. Farley Granger was just one of the
people connected to the picture who saw the casting as a mistake:
Of far more consequence than the film's adherence to an eighty-minute real-time framework was Hitchcock's decision to shoot the entire
picture in eight 10-minute takes, obviating the need for any cutting within scenes. At least during Rope's pre-production and shooting phases,
the director proclaimed that this challenge added up to his "most
exciting" filmmaking experience:
Largely to divert attention from what was essentially a static theatrical
piece and from the homoerotic assumptions of the film, Warner Brothers
also made a show of being enthusiastic about Hitchcock's ten-minute
takes, sending out daily press releases on the ingenuity of the director
and the prop men and finally even publishing an elaborate brochure
describing every move of the camera during production. What none of
the literature pointed out was that filming in such a manner made most
of the actors miserable. "With the exception of Hardwicke and Collier,
who were pretty along in years and who thought the whole thing was a
lark that they hadn't been exposed to before, it got very tense at times"
says Granger.
Stewart didn't hide his, especially when Warners pressured Hitchcock
into opening the set more than once for the media. Lingering at the
edges of one press conference, he suggested aloud to a member of the
crew that the studio start charging five dollars a head for tourists who
might be interested in all the technical secrets of extended takes. On
another occasion, he interrupted a query to the director about the film's
lengthy rehearsal schedule by declaring that "the only thing I
rehearsed around here is the camera." Screenwriter Arthur Laurents and
others involved in the movie have also reported the actor as doing some
considerable drinking during the shooting ("certainly more than I ever
expected," in the words of Laurents). Stewart himself has said that he was
so tense at times that he found it impossible to sleep at night.
More than didn't work, it didn't matter. Few critics spent words on the
technique of the extended takes when Rope opened in September 1948,
and fewer still thought it rescued the stagy, indifferently acted piece.
Seen today, it preserves little sap. The performance of Dall seems
especially monotonous, the camera trick of concluding every reel by
focusing on some dark jacket or other transition surface becomes
predictable, and even the plot suffers from Columbo Syndrome at critical junctures (i.e., just as in the case of the television detective played by Peter Falk, the murderers sometimes get tripped up on details that,
though challengeable by logic, were known only to the audience and
should never have bothered the investigator within the story). As
Granger describes it, Stewart looks mainly "uncomfortable," except for a
few minutes near the end when he gets to deliver a trademark
monologue, this time on the perfidy of the killers. Before then, even the
inevitable question to a character played by the actor—"Are you
crazy?"—as he is about to open the chest with the body draws merely a
glib "I hope so" from a figure who barely registers any sense of responsibility, let alone vulnerability, for the crime that has been committed. If
there is one moment that encapsulates the problems of Rope, however, it
comes about fifteen minutes before the end of the picture, when Dall's
Brandon suddenly silences the whimpering Philip with a slap. It is about
the only time in the film's eighty minutes that action takes precedence
over motion.
The picture fared little better with the public than it did with the
critics. It made its biggest ripples in Sioux City, Memphis, Seattle, and
Spokane, where local censors discerned enough of the homoerotic
subtext to ban it as immoral; Chicago used the same grounds for barring
it, though memories of the real Leopold-Loeb case also appeared to be a
contributing factor there. Abroad, West Germany refused to show it
without major cuts until 1963, while in other European countries it was a
commercial failure. For all his enthusiasm about his extended, single-reel
takes, Hitchcock had to wait until 1962 until another filmmaker declared
interest in the technique. In that year, India's A. S. A. Swami announced
plans for a 15,000-foot Tamil feature based on Rope. Swami's picture, never
shown in the West, was supposed to run for fifteen hours.
I suppose they got what they wanted in muting the homosexual
undercurrents by bringing Jimmy in, but I can't help but think that's all
they got. Jimmy never really got comfortable with the idea of playing this
real heavy, a true villain. After all, no matter what he says at the end, his
is the character that has triggered the killing in the story. He was
extremely conscious of being this dark figure, and that made him edgy all
the way through. He was a pro, of course, and he worked at it. But off
camera he wasn't especially friendly, and on camera I really never got the
feeling that we were building a scene together. Of course, a lot of that also
had to do with the fact that we were all a little distracted by Hitchcock's
technical considerations.
Every movement of the camera and the actors was worked out first in
sessions with a big blackboard, like football skull practice. Even the floor
was marked and plotted with numbered circles for the 25 to 30 camera
moves in each 10 minute reel. Whole walls of the apartment had to slide
away to allow the camera to follow the actors through narrow doors, then
swing back noiselessly to show a solid room. Even the furniture was "wild."
Tables and chairs had to be pulled away by prop men, then set in place
again by the time the camera returned to its original position, since the
camera was on a special crane, not on tracks, and designed to roll through
everything like a juggernaut.
We were constantly redoing scenes because the cameraman had moved
an instant too late so that some prop man came into a view with this
table in his hand or something like that. It was also Hitchcock's first color
film, so he was going to make the most of that by doing every room of the
apartment in a different color, and that made for more matching
problems. It sounds silly today, but one of my biggest problems was having
to trust that when I sat down, there would be a chair under my rear end,
that the stagehand had gotten there in time. All of that created a helluva
lot of insecurities.
"It was hard to see how the picture was going to work even while we were doing it. The noises made by the moving of the walls was a continual
problem, and we would have to do scenes over again just for sound
reasons, using only microphones like in a radio play. It was pretty
wearing. Nobody but Hitchcock would have tried it, but in the end it
really didn't work"