Rope (1948) – Review

Most movies would have you believe that there’s only two types of murder. There’s the ugly, vicious kind usually found in slasher flicks and action movies, that see the victims splattered about the place with reckless abandon; but on the flipside, there’s also the precise, artful kind that comes with a watertight plan to elegantly dispose of a body while throwing off the suspicions of anyone involved. Throughout his career Alfred Hitchcock dealt with both kinds, but while he didn’t mind things getting ugly with films like Psycho and Frenzy, you could tell he was having the most fun when trying to be neat.
This leads us to 1948’s Rope, which stands as possibly the most refined swing at murder Hitch ever took, while delivering the usual rules of a whodunit and scrambling them into an exhilarating oddity that smartly thumbs it’s nose and standard conventions. Making us privy to everything that’s going on and audaciously filmed as one continuous take (there are actually about six edits in the whole damn thing), could Rope be Hitchcock at his most malevolently mischevious?

We start with a murder – the strangulation of David Kentley to be exact – as two of his former classmates from prep school have plotted to eradicate his life in their Manhattan penthouse apartment. The reason for this flashy homicide is creepily simple – the egotistical Brandon Shaw and the more timid Phillip Morgan want to prove themselves as superior beings as they prescribe to the Nietzschian concept of the superman. However, even the most deranged supporter of these perverted ideals would claim that what Brandon and Phillip do next is ridiculously ballsy. After storing David’s body in an ornate, wooden chest in the middle of the drawing room, they then get to preparing to host the very party that their victim arrived early to. Filling out the guest list is none other than David’s father, his aunt, his fiancée and a close friend of his and because Brandon’s sense of humor is especially cruel, he switches the plans around to have the guests eat off the very trunk that David’s throttled body is stashed in.
As twisted as this all is there’s one final macabre jape left to play: the guest of honor is their former prep-school housemaster and current publisher, Rupert Cadell, whose misanthropic attitude to mankind and Nietzschian discussions gave Brandon and Phillip the idea to pull this off in the first place. However, once Caldell arrives, the pressure of mounting a full-blown dinner party minutes after a murder is commited soon starts to take effect. The narcissistic Brandon seems to delight in dropping hints as if he’s playing some sort of sadistic game, while Phillip gets more and more nervous as his alcohol intake steadily increases. It seems that Caldell senses that something’s up, but can’t quite put his finger on what that something is – but even he does manage to sleuth it out, will he empathise with the killer’s world view, or rage against it?

Rope sees Hitchcock on top, rule breaking form as he takes the play written by Patrick Hamilton and uses it to turn the rules of the conventional whodunit on its head. For example, while a lot of films dealing with the fact of a mysterious murder keeps you in the dark as long as possible to build suspense, Hitch blows the whole game instantaneously by literally starting the film with Brandon and Phillip choking the hapless David to death with the titular implement. We’re barely a couple minutes in the film and already we know who the killers are, what the motive is and where the body had been stashed – but while most movies end on these details, Hitchcock uses them to launch his story and instead has join the two murderers on a ride through one of the most socially awkward parties in cinema history.
As we’re essentially unwilling conspirators in this thing, we get to bear close witness to the bizarre game the killers have chosen to play. So monstrous is the ego of John Dall’s highly punchable Brandon, he’s eager to tease as many messed-up jokes as he possibly can on the people he’s entertaining (who are all directly linked to the victim, remember) for no other reason than it giving him a dark kick to do so. Conversely, while Brandon gets ever more drunk on his superiority (he even lends Mr. Kentley some books tied together with the very rope that murdered his son), Farley Granger’s progressively nervous Phillip just get plain old drunk as the pressure causes him to gradually crack under the strain. Watching one make awful puns at the expense of an unknowing family while the other visibly fraying at the edges proves to be incredibly gripping and you can tell that Hitch’s sadistic streak is relishing every minute of it. However, aside from a multitude of pleasantries that occur while there’s a hidden body in the room, Hitchcock throws yet another ingredient into the melting pot.

Obviously, staging a thriller in a single room that we never leave, with a cast of nine characters most of whom are unaware of what’s actually going on, meant that Hitchcock had given himself a fair amount of limitations to play with – but this apparently still wasn’t enough for the Master of Suspense, who happily hamstrung himself even further by added yet another restriction to the film. Seemingly eager to keep the feeling of the original play, Hitchcock opts to give the illusion that the film was shot in one continuous take that features only a mere six edits. To be fair, the edits aren’t that well hidden (at certain times, the camera will randomly track into the middle of someone’s back to wipe the frame, only to pull out again for no reason), but the craftsmanship is undeniable, especially as Hitch has to keep the camera in places where it can both keep up with the polite conversation and keep an eye on the guilty parties or the ominous trunk itself.
However, the final piece of the puzzle is the presence of James Stewart as the inquisitive Rupert Cadell. Less a keen mind trying to solve a murder and more of a someone trying to figure out why something feels incredibly wrong, he’s magnetic to watch. Whether he’s doubling down on the anti-human, Nietzschian views that’s caused this scenario in the first place, to being a much needed voice of reason once the jig is up, his presence helps paper over the cracks left by any drawbacks caused by the limitations of Hitchcock ambition or any lapses in realism. Surely David would have shit all over himself after being throttled which would have been an interesting scent for a party, the stagey demands of the story leads to one of the more obviously fake city backdrops in cinema and those demanding more physical thrills may soon grow impatient of Aunt Atwater’s inability to remember actors names, but all this fades into insignificance by how much Hitch manages to rope you in.

An ingenious concept is matched with an equally ingenious filmmaking style as Hitchcock keeps up a steady mix of drama, intrigue and subtext (if Brandon and Phillip aren’t gay, I’ll eat my trilby – if I had one). However, props also have to go to Stewart and the cast to keep such a thing flowing so naturally, so there’s no danger of choking on that skillfully mounted tension.
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