Rope (1948)
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VHS Movie Reviews of Rope (1948)
Movie Review: Can ideas kill?
Summary: 5 Stars
Alfred Hitchcock's first color movie, "Rope," explores a rare but disturbing motivation for murder: mere thought. As history - twentieth century history in particular - demonstrates, monstrous acts sometimes originate from ideas. A mere synaptic spark within the wrong psychological framework may translate into a skull fractured by a bullet, a deep wound occupied by a knife, or a genocidal extermination by a governing body. Human neural pathways, as varied as snowflakes, manifest these dangerous ideas in innumerable ways. Most fizzle within the guilty brains that formed them, impotent as wet matchbooks. Others, unfortunately, manage to find a conduit into the eye-for-an-eye realm of action. In such cases, concepts seem to murder. Imagination becomes brutal reality. "Rope" examines, via its morally diverse cast, both sides of this thorny fence.
A thriller in reverse, the movie begins with a murder. Following the opening street scene, across which Hitchcock struts, the camera hones in on a curtain-clad window. Then a scream. Inside, David Kently's body goes limp. Brandown Shaw and Phillip Morgan check for signs of life before uncoiling the thick rope around David's neck. After a brief period of shock Brandon resounds with pride, as if he had just reached the summit of Everest or bagged his dream job. Phillip remains distant, querulous, and shaky. Placing the murder minutes after the opening titles compels the viewer to focus on motivation. The act of killing gets de-emphasized. Something subtler tugs at this narrative thread.
More shocking than the strangulation is the party Brandon has planned. People will arrive at the scene of the crime, a beautiful apartment that breathtakingly overlooks downtown New York, soon. Brandon begins to rhapsodize about superiority. Weeding out of the weak, the responsibility of superior beings, etc. He rattles off a litany of social Darwinism derived from misunderstandings of Nietzsche. These ideas, the basis of David's killing, become prime suspects. And David, now hidden in the large chest that will soon provide the party's centerpiece, gets condemned as one of the "weaklings." The unknowing housemaid sets the food on top of the chest that contains the corpse. Brandon sees this as the icing on the cake. Phillip broods like a guilty child.
As the party picks up the question "where's David" occurs with increasing frequency. No one seems to know. David's fiancee arrives. So does her ex-boyfriend. Neither are pleased. Frustration builds. Finally, Brandon and Philip's inspiration, Rupert Cadell, played by a mesmerizing Jimmy Stewart in his first Hitchcock role, shows up. He comes across as intimidating and brash. Someone tells him, "it's good to see you again." He responds coldly, "why?" Brandon brings up "the perfect murder" and his beliefs about superiority. Rupert agrees with everything. He even adds in some bone-chilling nuances of his own. David's father, also an invitee, protests and demands that they stop their macabre conversation. He doesn't even want to hear the theories that Brandon finds so engaging. As if speech somehow bestows validity on ideas. As if ideas could somehow kill. Rupert becomes suspicious, which boils over when, upon his exit, the housemaid accidentally gives him a hat embossed with "DK" inside. David's hat. Rupert confronts the now nervous, and dangerous, duo.
The last ten minutes of the film contain indescribable tension. A gun appears. Ultimate control of the situation depends on its possessor. It changes hands a few times. Rupert sees and hears the consequences of the ideas he once fed Brandon. Reeling, he decides that morality depends on more than concepts. Something mysterious and ineffable bubbles under reprehensible acts. He tells Brandon "There's something deep down inside of you that would allow you to do this, just as there's something deep down inside of me that wouldn't allow it." And then Rupert's clincher, the movie's superquote: "Did you think you were God, Brandon?" Rupert's utterance, which probably had a different resonance for a 1948 audience, restores moral homeostasis. The line slashes Brandon's pretentions like a cutlass through yogurt. By juxtaposing Brandon's action with Rupert's inaction, the movie seems to say that belief in monstrous ideas does not imply a carrying out of reprehensible deeds. Instead, monstrous people, rife with amoral "stuff," that "something" Rupert alluded to, remain the problem. Ideas are off the hook. The film thus reveals a sticky, unanswerable question about human nature. If ideas produce different reactions in different people, then how do amoral acts arise?
In the final scene of this underrated Hitchcock masterpiece, a gun fires out a window. People stir. Sirens bellow. "You're going to die!" someone shouts. But no one in this film will die for mere ideas. Police can't arrest thoughts, and they can't apprehend concepts. "Rope" invites a deep reflection on the dichotomy between those that merely think of ideas and those arrestable folks who, unfortunately, decide to act on them.
Movie Review: "Did you think you were God, Brandon?"
Summary: 5 Stars
Alfred Hitchcock is my favorite Director! It is impossible for me to pick a favorite film as there are too many that I love and cannot live without. However, the one I seem to come back to more so than others is "Rope".
The plot (based off of the Leopold/Loeb murder of 1924) is pure Hitchcock. Two grad students/roommates strangle a fellow student and hide his body inside a trunk. The trunk is then covered with a tablecloth, candles and food that is to be used for a party to entertain (who else) the victim's family and friends.
I love the fact that this is the first movie to be shot in real time. Hitch makes his cuts every ten minutes (the length of film that a camera could hold in 1948) by closing in and out of a character's back, the trunk or a wall.
Another thing that I always pay attention to is how the fake backdrop outside the large livingroom window looks amazingly real as the film carries on and the sun sets. Kudos to the property master and the lighting department!
Hitchcock also loved anything taboo and perverse. He went to great lengths to let us know that these two roommates were not only killers but that they were lovers as well! The overtones are unmistakeable and I can't believe it got past the censors. John Dall and Farley Granger play it up to the nines!
I won't spoil the ending or tell you why the two men decided to murder their victim in the first place. I will tell you that this is definitely Hitchcock's first masterpiece! Pure suspense! Go buy or rent it right now! You won't be sorry!
Movie Review: The Story of the Perfect Murder Directed Perfectly
Summary: 5 Stars
This film was fantastic! I had seen it when I was much younger and remembered it being good, but having just re-watched it I was struck by how much it felt like a filmed play. The very long shots helped establish the real-time aspect of this thrilling story and Hitchcock's brilliant directing really shines. Great performances all around and with any Hitchcock picture, every moment feels like it was carefully thought out and executed for the greatest effect. Watching Jimmy Stewart (Rupert) piece together the evidence was as exciting as watching John Dall (Brandon) and Farley Granger (Phillip) try to keep it together. I've read that Hitchcock wasn't particularly fond of this film, and I'll grant that he certainly has created better films, but I'd take an evening of Rope over an evening of Final Destination 3 any day.Movie Review: An excellent psychological thriller by Hitchcock
Summary: 5 Stars
This obscure movie has always been one of my favorite Hitchcock films. In my opinion, it marks the beginning of the golden era of largely flawless Hitchcock films that runs for 15 years through the release of "The Birds" in 1963.
The movie is based on a play by Patrick Hamilton, inspired by the Leopold-Loeb case. The film follows two young men, in one apartment, on one night, as they throw a dinner party for a bunch of people that were close friends of both themselves and a third young man they have just murdered for no reason other than to have experienced the act of doing so. For the added thrill, they throw the victim's body into a chest from which they serve their guests their buffet dinner.
The dinner guests include David's father, who is making constant references to how he is worried about how his only child is missing when David doesn't turn up where he is supposed to, and how his wife, David's mother, is most consumed with worry. Janet, David's current girlfriend, is also invited, as is Janet's old boyfriend. These two interact very awkwardly, to the delight of their murderous hosts, until the end of the party. Janet explains to her old flame how she took up with David because of love, not because of his money, and when her old boyfriend sees that Janet genuinely cares for David, the two reach a truce. The point of all of this conversation at the party is to show that David - as is true with all human beings - isn't some inferior lab rat that the two murderers had the right to exterminate as a means of spending an otherwise boring afternoon. He is a human, as important as any other, who has people who care about him and will obviously mourn his death.
James Stewart is great as the murderers' former teacher, Rupert, who solves the mystery that the two killers have pretty much dared him to discover and solve. Hitchcock was always able to direct James Stewart to play just about any role he could dream up without letting Stewart's "every man" quality get in the way of the quality and believability of his performance. It is interesting to note that at the end of the film, from James Stewart's final speech to the two murderers, that we assume the pair will be tried for murder and executed. Some people don't know that although Leopold and Loeb - the inspiration for this film - were sentenced to life in prison for their crime, that Leopold was released on parole in 1958 after serving 33 years, and lived another 13 years in freedom before his death. Loeb was killed by another inmate in the 1930's, otherwise he would have likely been paroled eventually, too. Since Leopold and Loeb killed a child rather than another adult, we can't really be sure what would have become of Hitchcock's two murderers had this been a real life situation.
The one thing that did surprise me was on the commentary, when it was mentioned that the two murdering college students were homosexuals, and that Hitchcock pushed the envelope on inuendos on this subject just as far as he thought the censors would let him. Maybe I'm just dense, but I never got that vibe out of the movie at all, until I was told that it existed in the first place.
"Rope" is just a little over an hour long, and is performed entirely in one room of one apartment. It is a psychological thriller, not one of Hitchcock's action thrillers. It's definitely worthwhile for any Hitchcock fan, but it might disappoint someone who buys this without knowing the movie's format and is expecting something like "The Man Who Knew Too Much" or "North by Northwest". If you want to watch "Rope", but don't want to buy it on a DVD dedicated just to it, you might consider purchasing "Alfred Hitchcock - The Masterpiece Collection". That box set has a total of 14 of Hitchcock's better known films from the late 40's through the 70's, and "Rope" is one of the included films.
Movie Review: Hitchcock Experimenting
Summary: 4 Stars
Following the success of the film "Gaslight", based on a play written by Englishman Patrick Hamilton, Alfred Hitchcock, who had no hand in the making of that film, scheduled a film adaptation of a 1929 play by the same author, "Rope". In each of the plays, suspense is the chief element. In "Rope" we watch a dinner party held in a New York apartment. Two university students, prompted by self-justifying bravado, murder a third. They hide his body in a large chest upon which they then set the food for the guests, all family and friends of the murdered student, to partake.
How to create an 80 minute film set entirely in one New York apartment was challenging. Hitchcock decided to film it in color (his first color film), to present the action in an apparently seamless series of 10 minute "takes", and to start the film with the murder (it had not been included in the play).
Seeing his film in this excellent DVD restoration, it is some of these filming decisions that I have found most interesting. The dialogue may be unnatural, and the cast members uneasy, but the man in charge of filming certainly knew how to build suspense. Especially effective is the ending, when the illuminated advertising signs and the noises from the streets below begin to infiltrate through the windows.
Included in the extras are comments from scriptwriters, a cast member, and Hitchcock's daughter.