When you consider that the 1948 cult-classic was one of the master director’s lesser known and less heralded works, his achievement in cinema – which I would suggest amounts to nothing less than the invention of modern cinema, from its plot and characters to how it is filmed and edited – is all the more astounding.
The name “Alfred Hitchcock” is synonymous with suspense, macabre tales of murder and revenge, frequently featuring some kind of dramatic twist. Many of the movies he’s made are so legendary, they need no introduction: Psycho, The Birds, North by Northwest, Rear Window, Vertigo, Rebecca, and the list could go on. Even beyond being masterworks in and of themselves, these films and others helped define – if not actually define from whole cloth – their respective genres. Psycho, for example, remains the template for the modern slasher, down to introducing a protagonist who dies in the first act and mentally troubled killer with mother issues who wields an oversized knife. Similarly, North by Northwest set the stage for the James Bond franchise that would follow and all of the action and adventure movies, complete with the necessary thrills, chills, twists, and turns, that we enjoy today. The Birds, just slightly beneath the surface, is a classic disaster movie. Rear Window, an amateur detective story, the seminal ordinary man that gets in over his head, Vertigo, the archetypal psychological thriller. To a large extent, it seems that Hitchcock’s films can be defined by how many firsts he could cram in, how many breakthroughs he could fit in a single movie. Granted, these breakthroughs sometimes seem absurd by modern standards – Psycho was the first film to feature the image of a toilet flushing. They can also be sublime: Vertigo marks both the first use of computer animation in a film during the opening credits and the now ubiquitous dolly zoom, where the camera moves as the length of the lens changes, making it appear that the background either comes closer or moves further away from the subject. Hitchcock also enjoyed pushing the thematic limits of filmmaking, featuring subject matter and characters that were considered taboo for the time. Psycho’s Norman Bates could be considered transgender, adopting his mother’s sex. The movie begins with a scene of an unmarried man and woman in bed. The woman is in a bra. The infamous shower scene baffled the censors, who were not sure whether or not they could see a woman’s breast throughout the 60 or 70 some odd shots in less than a minute (believe it or not, this is a hotly debated topic). It might seem standard fare today, but none of this was commonplace at the time. At points, Hitchcock appeared to make decisions about his films on a dare, crafting masterpieces simply by setting challenges for himself. Psycho, to continue the example, was widely seen as Hitchcock responding to complaints that he’d become a big budget filmmaker and could no longer work on a small scale. When Paramount, who described the effort as “too repulsive,” “impossible for films,” and claimed they did not like “anything about it all,” refused to fund it, Hitchcock financed the film himself and changed the world upon its release in 1960.
Rope, produced 12 years earlier, represents what is perhaps one of the most idiosyncratic and transgressive of these efforts, combining unheard of technical wizardry with highly subversive themes at the time. The plot centers around an apparently gay couple, a fact never stated specifically under the censorship codes, but more than obvious to viewers even then, enough that some of its lack of success at the box office has been blamed on the homophobia prevalent at the time. This couple, Brandon and Phillip, in a set up clearly inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment, kills a former classmate, David, in their Manhattan apartment as an experiment in the “perfect murder,” simply to prove that they can do it with no remorse. After hiding the body in a large chest in the living room, they attempt to demonstrate their emotional detachment and superiority to normal people by hosting a dinner party that includes David’s father and his fiancée, Janet. Also in attendance is a former headmaster of theirs, Rupert, who indirectly inspired their crime by introducing the pair to the ideas of Frederick Nietzsche and the Uber mensch who cannot be confined by traditional morality. Throughout the dinner party, the chest concealing the body serves as the buffet, much to the dismay of their housekeeper, while most of the attendees wait patiently and then impatiently on David’s arrival. Dostoyevsky’s novel fuses the remorseful murderer and amoralistic killer into a single character until the better angel of our nature overpowers the darker, but the Rope and the stage play on which it is best wisely uses two characters to demonstrate the after effects of the crime on the human psyche. Brandon suffers from a little anxiety that they might get caught, but otherwise displays no guilt or remorse, feeling the thrill of some kind of achievement more than anything else. After Rupert asks enough questions to suggest that he might be suspicious of the pair, Brandon complains that the evening has gone rotten – not because of the murder, but because of the inquisition. His cold detachment and macabre spite reach a peak when he uses the very rope they used to strangle David, to tie up some books for his father to take home. Phillip, meanwhile, is almost immediately racked by doubt, unable to come to grips with the atrocity he has committed, drinking heavily instead of facing the truth or confessing. Ultimately, Rupert will not be denied, and after Phillip throws a glass and accuses him of toying with them, he grabs hold of a gun and forces the pair to open the chest, revealing the murder. He fires three shots into the air and they wait for the police to arrive while Brandon nonchalantly plays the piano.
Technically, the film occurs in real time, or close to it, from the moment of the murder to the denouement. Rather than using the standard shot-counter shot editing patterns of the day, Hitchcock chose to film the entire 80 minute running time as four extended takes, using subtle editing techniques when the camera would pan over to a static object to give the impression that the ten minute film reels are continuous. At the time, the projectionist in the theater also had to change film reels during playback. For these breaks, occurring every twenty minutes, Hitchcock changed the camera angle to avoid confusing the viewer. His cleverness extended to condensing the time over which these events would actually occur in the real world, resulting in a pace a little quicker than usual. The Portuguese Neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, analyzed the film for Scientific American in 2002, and determined that the actual period must have been about 25% longer than the film’s running time, some 100 minutes in total, but to make that seamless to the audience, the dinner itself only lasts 20 minutes and the sun actually sets faster than it would in real life. The casual viewer doesn’t notice this while watching because the set upon which the action takes place is surrounded by the largest cyclorama ever at the time and rather than a static backdrop, it featured smoking chimneys, twinkling lights on buildings, moving clouds, and the setting sun itself. To the audience, it seems the end of a rather irregular day, but the effect is only achieved through the magic of Hitchcocks’ detailed, heightened story telling. To say this was groundbreaking at the time, is an understatement among understatements. No one had conceived, much less executed anything like it before. It would be another ten years before an equally famous, if shorter, long take was created by Orsen Welles in Touch of Evil, and that was only for the opening sequence, not the entire movie. Such things were simply not done in the relatively low-budget, fast production world of the late 1940s, where quantity frequently mattered more than quality. As the late film critic Roger Ebert described it, Rope is “one of the most interesting experiments ever attempted by a major director working with big box-office names.” The actors themselves were a tad less enthused, however, given the exhaustive set up and rehearsal required to capture these extended sequences, much of which focused on getting the motions of the camera and the crew right above all else. “The really important thing being rehearsed here is the camera, not the actors!” Exclaimed Jimmy Stewart, who played Rupert. Years later, he remarked, “It was worth trying—nobody but Hitch would have tried it. But it really didn’t work.”
At the risk of disagreeing with a Hollywood legend, I beg to differ. Based on a stage play where the action takes place in a single confined setting, the real-time one-take approach lends an air of credibility and tension to what might have been a rather ordinary suspenseful melodrama. It’s as if the actors are performing for you and you alone, allowing you to walk beside them throughout, or you were witnessing something real, wherein anything might happen. The performances themselves, particularly as Phillip grows more intoxicated and guilty, David’s family gets more impatient, and Rupert develops his suspicions are also heightened by being continuous. Although what you are watching is pure movie magic, it doesn’t seem that way because there are none of the little gaps that occur between cuts and as part of the editing sequence, the subtle shifts of the light or focus that can interrupt a moment and let you know you are watching a film rather than the real thing. Regardless, reviews at the time were decidedly mixed with critics praising it as a technical marvel, but perhaps finding the one-shot approach almost too revolutionary. Variety claimed, “Hitchcock could have chosen a more entertaining subject with which to use the arresting camera and staging technique displayed in Rope …The continuous action and the extremely mobile camera are technical features of which industry craftsmen will make much, but to the layman audience effect is of a distracting interest.” The New York Times opined, “The novelty of the picture is not in the drama itself, it being a plainly deliberate and rather thin exercise in suspense, but merely in the method which Mr. Hitchcock has used to stretch the intended tension for the length of the little stunt. And, with due regard for his daring (and for that of Transatlantic Films), one must bluntly observe that the method is neither effective nor does it appear that it could be.” Even Hitchcock himself had his doubts, claiming it was an “experiment that didn’t work out” and blocking its re-release for almost three decades. Others, however, found in it what I do. Harrison’s Reports called it “an exceptionally fine psychological thriller,” featuring “excellent” acting, “an ingenious technique, and under Hitchcock’s superb handling it serves to heighten the atmosphere of mounting suspense and suspicion.” The dark and disturbing subject matter was also apparent. The Chicago Tribune claimed, “If Mr. Hitchcock’s purpose in producing this macabre tale of murder was to shock and horrify, he has succeeded all too well. The opening scene is sickeningly graphic, establishing a feeling of revulsion which seldom left me during the entire film….Undeniably clever in all of its aspects, this film is a gruesome affair and—to me, at least—was a gruelling spectacle, not recommended to the sensitive.”
Contributing to this impression is the real-life inspiration for the play and subsequently the film. On May 21, 1924, Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb kidnapped and murdered a 14-year old boy while they were students at the University of Chicago. Like their fictional counterparts in Rope, they did so because they were convinced they could carry out the “perfect murder” to demonstrate their superior intellect. Both men were from affluent backgrounds, living in the wealthy Kentwood neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. The Loebs even owned an estate in Michigan to escape the city during the oppressive summer months. They took their inspiration directly from Nietzsche’s philosophy, which Loeb himself described as “A superman…is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.” They began to experiment with petty crime, breaking into a fraternity house, before graduating to arson, but when these early efforts did not gain the attention they sought from the media, the pair, who had become close at college, began planning a murder. After seven months of planning – including a hope that they could distract the police with a ransom demand and complicated proposals to deliver the money, Leopold and Loeb identified Robert “Bobby” Franks, a 14-year old who was also from a wealthy background and lived across the street from Loeb. They offered him a ride home that fateful day in May 1924, but the boy initially refused, saying it was just a short walk. Loeb persuaded him with a discussion of a tennis racket, luring him into the front seat. It’s believed that Leopold drove while Loeb struck Bobby in the back of the head with a chisel several times. The two then stashed the body on the floor of the car, and drove to the agreed-upon disposal site in Hammond, Indiana. They attempted to hide Bobby’s identity by pouring hydrochloric acid on his face and genitals. When they returned to Chicago, Leopold phoned Bobby’s mother, claiming he was George Johnson and he’d kidnapped the boy. The body was found before they could enact the full plan, however, and after destroying some additional evidence, the murderous pair attempted to resume their normal lives, but intense pressure from the police caused their efforts to completely unravel in barely a week. They were ultimately sentenced to 99 years in jail without parole. Loeb was killed in prison in 1936 at 30 years old. Leopold made it to parole and died in Puerto Rico in 1971. At the trial, legendary attorney Clarence Darrow blamed their university. “This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor. Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”
In that sense, Rope expertly blends themes straight out of one of the greatest literary talents to ever live, inspiration from real life, a compelling and suspenseful script, top notch acting, and unprecedented technical innovation in a way that had never been seen before. It would be decades before anyone attempted it again, and in most of those cases like the far more recent 1917, the “one shot” approach is achieved with technology that simply didn’t exist at the time, ultimately serving as more of a gimmick than anything else. Hitchcock, however, was keenly interested in using the camera to depict the emotional state of the characters. The dolly zoom in Vertigo, for example, perfectly captures the confusion and psychological breakdown of the disorder. Rope, by comparison, captures the building tension, the need for something to break, the claustrophobia of the characters all in an apartment with a dead man hidden in a trunk right in the middle of the room in a way that simply wouldn’t be as real and immediate with traditional storytelling techniques. When you consider that this is one of Hitchcock’s lesser known and less heralded works, his achievement in cinema – which I would suggest amounts to nothing less than the invention of modern cinema, from its plot and characters to how it is filmed and edited – is all the more astounding. It’s reasonable to assume that some other talented director would’ve pioneered these techniques if Hitchcock hadn’t. There are have been other gifted minds in the film industry, many of whom from Federico Fellini to Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg to David Lynch have contributed to the medium today. The fact that one man, however, has contributed so much on so many fronts makes Hitchcock a singular force, the rare instance when we can say for sure that movie making would not be the same without him.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 