Left Field Cinema

Rope is considered among the high, second shelf of Alfred Hitchcock movies, for me it’s a maguffin-less script that brims with sound-stage showiness, Rope is among my top five Hitchcock films. Hitchcock’s first colour film released in 1948 is an exercise in camera movement and takes, all bar one over five minutes, evoking the deliberate dollies and shifts he would do for dramatic effect, the other difference with Rope to most of his suspense thrillers is the absence of a score, a cinematic choice which I like but see too frequency adopted by pretentious, realism, dogmatic directors who will simply never write dialogue quiet like Rope screenwriters Ben Hecht, a Hitchcock favourite and then Farley Granger lover Arthur Laruents.

Told in real-time, John Dall is Brandon who with Phillip, Farley Granger, gamely strange a former classmate David, in the first frame, and try to find a place to hide the corpse and rope in Brandon’s apartment, the scene for the crime, the party and the whole film. The unmotivated murder seems to have a connection with their school housemaster Rupert played by James Steward, who gladly spoke of art of murder concepts and its level of human superiority. Brandon & Phillip decide to hide the body in a chest, which David’s aunt puts the party buffet on, also attending is David‘s father and fiancée Janet Walker, who’s former lover Kenneth comes attending and intending to re-establish a relationship with the husband-to-be and now dead David, Brandon pre-empting and inviting Rupert. As to quote the more gayful Phillip, “Now the fun begins”.

Hitchcock’s first Technicolor film is similar in scenes to Dial M for Murder & Under Capricorn, barely aging 60 years on, .Shot in two weeks Rope is one of five/six success he did in his film a year for seven-years run from the acting/dialogue brilliance of Notorious in 1946 to his ultimate maguffin-less picture, 1951’s Strangers on a Train, similar to Rope in homosexuality inkling, blackmail, murder and my favourite Hitchcock film. Being it was based on a Patrick Hamilton play of the same name considered a melodrama, its all down to the writing and acting to balance, which combines the sinister brilliance of Steward and his gray-hair, the assured performances of John Dall, Cedric Hardwicke & Joan Chandler, unfortunately Farley Granger is as plain annoying, again like his modern day comparison Keanu Reeves, he’s frequently puppy eyed/ mined in great films, John Dall is far more articulate and believable as a preppy student, Dall is also subtlety convincing as a homosexual killer as well, Granger is incapable of subtlety, maybe like his similarly innocent characterisation in Strangers on the Train seems pail with Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train or John Dall in Rope bringing the lock and stock.

No line of dialogue is wasted; moral dilemmas are exposed, much like the concept of a perfect crime, maybe the one motive for the young students, to do one over the ‘establishment’. Only the last reel of the film seems broken up into two cuts, this is no fault on Hitchcock’s part, the only thing he didn’t experiment with was the abandonment of an ‘emotional-score’ which would have made the film even more like last year’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, another film which keeps consistent in style and manipulates the audience through brilliant hints to convention, guns and knives showed but not used. Rope remains today one of three of his movies that could be remade, the famous five Hitchcock are brilliant as is, obviously the coming remake of The Birds is pointless, the story was pathetic to begin with, Rope should be remade on video, if it isn’t good, it won’t wreck the original, which will always be the first, great real-time drama-film.

Darcy S. McCallum