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Rope (1948)
Synopsis
The film follows two young, wealthy men as they strangle a former classmate in their apartment. They hide the body in a wooden chest, and begin preparations for a dinner party they are giving that evening.
Guests at the party include the murdered boys parents and fiancée, and their school professor, who years before had given a lecture which caused the boys to turn to murder. The professor apparently showed favouritism to the idea that anybody capable of murder, and getting away with it, was a superior being.
Of the two murderers, Brandon is excited by the act, and makes a show of it, using the chest containing the body as a buffet table for the party food. Phillip is shocked and depressed at what they have done, and spends the evening snapping at people, in particular when somebody mentions his strangling of chickens as a child. He vehemently denies it, but his Rupert, the professor, testifies he has seen Phillip do it himself.
The parents of the murdered boy begin to become worried when he doesn't show up at the party, or get in contact, and decide to leave. The boy’s father is given a parcel of books by Brandon, tied up in the very rope used to kill his son.
While leaving, Rupert is handed the wrong hat, and looking inside, discovers the initials of the murdered boy. This confirms the belief he has slowly been garnering, and after everybody has left, he returns to the apartment, claiming he has forgotten his cigarette case, which he plants in the apartment, and "conveniently" finds a little while later.
He stays for another drink, and begins to theorise the whereabouts of David, the murdered boy. Brandon in particular seems very keen to have Rupert discover the crime, sure that he would approve of it. A drunken Phillip can take no more, and throws a fit of rage.
Rupert correctly deduces the whereabouts of the body, and looking into the chest, is sickened and horrified that his rhetoric so many years ago has led the boys to murder. He seizes Brandon's gun, and fires shots into the night sky, to attract the police to the scene. The film ends as police sirens can be heard, approaching the apartment.
Review
This is an interesting movie from a theatrical standpoint, as it was developed from a play, and Hitchcock seems to have filmed it with that in mind. The whole film takes place inside the apartment, with a panoramic view out of it's windows on the skyline of the city. The movie is filmed as if all in one long take, although there are cuts about every ten minutes, due to the length of film Hitchcock had to film with. These cuts are obtained by the camera zooming in on a dark area, such as a characters back, the film changing, and the camera zooming out again. In this way, the film is viewed in "real time," from the moment of the murder, up to its conclusion. The passage of time is marked by the changing of the sky in the background, which begins as a bright sunny afternoon, and progresses to evening. Since the entire thing was shot in a studio, this was accomplished with really clever lighting, and in many ways this cityscape and sky, with its smoking chimneys and moving clouds is the real star of the film.
As for the story itself, it's a little slow and wordy. The idea of the movie is the moral complexities of murder for murders sake, but that doesn't necessarily transcribe well onto celluloid. The original idea for the movie was to join the action just after the body has been hidden away, and so you don't actually know if the body is in the trunk. The moments of suspense when the housekeeper and the guests almost open the trunk were destroyed, as we already knew the body was there. If we, the audience, weren't privy to this, we'd be just as excited by the prospect of discovering the body in the trunk, and that would have made a much better film.
Overall, I wouldn't call this is a bad film, but it's certainly not one of Hitch's best. It's worth watching if you're a fan of the cinematics of movies, as well as the plot.
The Cameo
Hitchcock's cameo is a little disputed in this film, and indeed I didn't notice it. Since the entirety of the film is set in the apartment, Hitchcock's famous silhouette appears as a neon light outside the window, but since this was quite hard to spot, he can also be seen in the distance, walking down the street in the establishing shots in the beginning of the movie.
The Score
It's not a fantastic film, but it's by no means a bad one either, so I give Rope six fat guys out of ten.
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