Rope

A 1948 classic psychological thriller from Alfred Hitchcock starring Bill favorite James Stewart along with John Dall and a young Farley Granger, Rope is a take on the sensational 1924 murder case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Hitchcock does something rarely seen these days, staging the entire film inside a single, modest-sized space, specifically the living room, foyer and dining room of an uptown Manhattan apartment.

Dall and Granger are Brandon and Phillip, two upper crust young gentlemen recently graduated from an Ivy League college, whose apartment we’re looking at throughout. Having been avid pupils of Rupert Cadell, a purveyor of some very elitist, libertarian philosophy as the headmaster at their prep school, the two–but especially Brandon–are determined to act on their belief that the rules of common morality don’t apply to men of superior intellect.

Just how they’ll act on it is by strangling their prep school chum David, in the opening scene. To maximize the return on the deed, the young men have a dinner party just afterwards, with David’s parents, his fiance Janet and her previous beau Kenneth, plus Rupert, as the guests. Pushing this to the limit, after murdering him they hide the body in a big wooden chest on which the dinner buffet is set out. David was invited too, of course, and his whereabouts are a continuing question for the characters.

Brandon is the strong one; if it were just him involved he’d have gotten away with it. Phillip, though, is far too high strung and as the time goes on Rupert picks up more and more on little clues he gives off until at the climax, when the others have left, he comes back to the apartment on a flimsy excuse and extracts the truth.

You may wonder why I’ve given away the plot here but I doubt few people would have trouble seeing the result far in advance. No, the real pleasure here is in the superb acting by Dall (especially), Granger and Stewart and in Hitchcock’s staging and pacing; compared to current filmmaking, even low budget indie flicks like, say, Clerks or El Mariachi, the director does so much with nothing but a handful of actors and even fewer simple props. For some reason I’ve not seen too many of the master’s movies but now I see that will have to change.

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