Believing themselves to be intellectually superior to their
contemporaries, flatmates Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley
Granger) murder their friend David Kentley purely to see if they
can get away with it. They then throw a cocktail party, serving
food from the top of the trunk where they have hidden David's
body. Their guests include both David's her and fiancée, as
well as college lecturer Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), who
becomes increasingly suspicious as the evening wears on. Director
Alfred Hitchcock constructed the film out of ten continuous
reels, making no use of his usual montage technique and keeping
cuts to a minimum.
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An experimental film masquerading as a standard Hollywood
thriller. The plot of Rope is simple and based on a successful
stage play: two young men (John Dall and Farley Granger) commit
murder, more or less as an intellectual exercise. They hide the
body in their large apartment, then throw a dinner party. Will
the body be discovered? Director Alfred Hitchcock, fascinated by
the possibilities of the long-take style, decided to shoot this
story as though it were happening in one long, uninterrupted
. Since the camera can only hold one 10-minute reel at a
time, Hitchcock had to be creative when it came time to change
reels, disguising the switches as the camera passed behind
someone's back or moved behind a lamp. In later years Hitchcock
wrote off the approach as misguided, and Rope may not be one of
Hitchcock's top movies, but it's still a nail-biter. They don't
call him the Master of Suspense for nothing. James Stewart (
/gp/search?search-alias=dvd&field-keywords=James%20Stewart+-ntsc
), as a suspicious professor, marks his first starring role for
Hitchcock, a collaboration that would lead to the masterpieces
Rear Window and . --Robert Horton
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Synopsis
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Based on the famous Leopold and Loeb murder case (from which two
other films, COMPULSION and SWOON, were also derived), ROPE both
challenges and terrifies the audience. Alfred Hitchcock disdained
the whodunit crime story, which he felt lacked emotional force,
and ROPE shows the director's preference for letting the audience
know more than the characters onscreen. The film opens as two
young men (Farley Granger and John Dall) strangle a friend just
to prove they're intellectually capable of committing the perfect
crime. To add to the amusement, they hide the body in a trunk
that will serve as the dinner table for a party honoring the
deceased. The film hones in on an hour and a half of the party,
with the constantly moving camera capturing the changing
emotional atmosphere as the guests grow increasingly concerned
about the e of the missing boy. Rope is a directorial tour de
force, blending complex camera movement with intricate staging to
present the entire story in near-real time in one location.
Notably, the adaptation of the play by Patrick Hamilton was
written by perennial Hitchcock actor Hume Cronyn.
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