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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - August 28th

"ROPE" released in 1948

In this second "limited setting" film from master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock (the first being 1944's Lifeboat), Rope was based on the original play by Patrick Hamilton, which was said to be inspired by the real-life murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. In Hitchcock's version, Rope tells the story of two sociopathic college students Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) who viciously strangle their classmate David Kentley (Dick Hogan), and then invite the dead man's family and friends, including their mutual mentor Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), to a dinner party at the scene of the crime!

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In a Manhattan penthouse, two brilliant young aesthetes, Brandon Shaw (Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Granger), strangle to death their former classmate, David (Hogan) and hide his body in a large antique wooden chest in the middle of their apartment. The two then start to prepare for their dinner guests to arrive, including the dead man's father, Mr. Kentley (Cedric Hardwicke), his aunt Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier), and  fiancée, Janet Walker (Joan Chandler) - as well as Janet's former lover (and David's close friend)  Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick). Their sole purpose to committing the crime and inviting such company afterwards is, for Brandon and Phillip, purely an intellectual exercise; they want to prove their superiority by committing the "perfect murder". Such an idea for the murder having been inspired years earlier by conversations with their prep school housemaster, publisher Rupert Cadell (Stewart), and he too is among the guests at the party, since Brandon in particular feels that he would approve of their "work of art". As the guests all arrive, Brendan not-so-subtly hints to David's absence, which only further antagonizes Phillip who, unlike the calm and in control Brendan, is visibly upset and filled with guilt. A suspicious Rupert quizzes a fidgety Phillip about this and about some of the inconsistencies that have been raised in conversation. For example, Phillip had vehemently denied ever strangling a chicken at the Shaws' farm, but Rupert has personally seen Phillip strangle several. As the evening goes on, David's father and fiancée begin to worry that he has neither arrived nor phoned and Brandon further increases the tension by playing matchmaker between Janet and Kenneth. Mr. Kentley decides to leave and he takes with him some books Brandon has given him, tied together with the same rope Brandon and Phillip used to strangle his son! Convinced that they have proved their intellectual superiority by not being discovered by their dinner guests, Brendan proposes they celebrate - only to have Rupert arrive back at the apartment, who intends to end this game of "cat and mouse" for good!

Brandon: The good Americans usually die young on the battlefield, don't they? Well, the Davids of this world merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect murder. Course he, uh, he was a Harvard undergraduate. That might make it justifiable homicide.

Top:   The two murderers, Phillip (Farley Granger) and Brendan (John Dall);

Above:   The dinner guests, including Prof. Rupert Cadell (James Stewart) are unaware a dead body is right in front of them!

The story for Rope was very loosely based on the real-life murder committed by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (which was also the (fictionalized) subject of Compulsion (1959) and Swoon (1992)), with Patrick Hamilton's stage-play adaptation premiering at the Strand Theatre in 1929. The play was first broadcast on experimental live television by the BBC, on 8 March 1939, having adapted by Hamilton, produced by Dallas Bower, and used long takes - Bower decided on the technique in order to keep the murder chest constantly in shot. Director Alfred Hitchcock later said he saw (or heard about) the long takes of this television production and was inspired to attempt a feature film version. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope is very different from Hamilton's play, although the basic plot is followed rather faithfully. Hitchcock made his own adaptation with Hume Cronyn and they created new dialogue and characters for their adaptation. In addition, fellow screenwriter Arthur Laurents claimed that originally Hitchcock assured him the movie wouldn't show the opening murder itself, therefore creating doubt as to whether the two leading characters actually committed murder and whether the trunk had a corpse inside. Casting frequent leading man James Stewart in the role of Rupert Cadell, Hitchcock offered Stewart a substantial fee of $300,000 from the film's $1.5 million budget to star in Rope. Stewart however would later admit he felt he was miscast as the professor, and his disappointment at his character making his first entrance 28 minutes into the film.

Rope was filmed entirely in-studio (except for the opening credits) with an extraordinary cyclorama in the background was the largest backing ever used on a sound stage. It included models of the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings, numerous chimneys smoke, lights come on in buildings, neon signs light up, and the sunset which slowly unfolds as the movie progresses (the clouds themselves being made out of fibreglass). As well as being Hitchcock's first Technicolor film, it was also his "experimental", carefully designing and storyboarding each shot so it could be seamlessly edited together into one continuious shot! Rope was shot with a total of ten printed takes, ranging from four-and-a-half minutes to just over ten minutes (the maximum amount of film that a camera magazine or projector reel could hold). At the end of the takes, the film alternates between having the camera zoom into a dark object, totally blacking out the lens/screen, and making a conventional cut. However, the second edit, ostensibly one of the conventional ones, was clearly staged and shot to block the camera, but the all-black frames were left out of the final print. Most of the props, and even some of the apartment set's walls, were on casters and the crew had to wheel them out of the way and back into position as the camera moved around the set. Since the filming times were so long, everybody on the set tried their best to avoid any mistakes. At one point in the movie, the camera dolly ran over and broke a cameraman's foot, but to keep filming, he was gagged and dragged off. Another time, a woman puts her glass down but misses the table. A stagehand had to rush up and catch it before the glass hit the ground. Both parts are used in the final cut. On average, Hitchcock only managed to shoot roughly one segment per day. The last four or five segments had to be completely re-shot because Hitchcock wasn't happy with the color of the sunset.

Brandon: I've always wished for more artistic talent. Well, murder can be an art, too. The power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create.

Top:   James Stewart on the set of Rope;

Above:   Alfred Hitchcock directs the action

On it's release in 1948, Rope was actually banned in several theaters due to it's homosexual subtext between the characters Brandon and Phillip (homosexuality still being a highly controversial theme for the 1940's). Although Rope made it past the Production Code censors however, during the film's production, those involved described homosexuality as "it". Critics were also divided about Hitchcock's latest picture. In 1948, Variety magazine said "Hitchcock could have chosen a more entertaining subject with which to use the arresting camera and staging technique displayed in Rope." That same year, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times said 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" for a "story of meager range". Roger Ebert wrote a retrospective in 1984, "Alfred Hitchcock called Rope an 'experiment that didn’t work out', and he was happy to see it kept out of release for most of three decades," but went on to say that "Rope remains one of the most interesting experiments ever attempted by a major director working with big box-office names, and it's worth seeing just for that...".

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   97%