Rope (film)

Recent reviews and criticism of Rope have noticed a homosexual subtext between the characters Brandon and Phillip,[15][16][17] even though homosexuality was a highly controversial theme for the 1940s. The play on which the film was based explicitly portrays Brandon and Phillip as being in a homosexual relationship.[18] John Dall, who played Brandon, is believed to have been gay,[19][20] as was screenwriter Arthur Laurents, while co-star Farley Granger was bisexual.[21]

Interviewed by Vito Russo for Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, Laurents stated, "We never discussed, Hitch and I, whether the characters in Rope were homosexuals, but I thought it was apparent."[22] In the 1995 documentary film adaptation of Russo's book, Laurents says, "I don't think the censors at that time realized this was about gay people. They didn't have a clue what was and what wasn't, that's how it got by."[23] In the same documentary, Granger says of Brandon and Phillip: "We knew that they were gay, yeah, sure. I mean, nobody said anything about it—this was 1947, let's not forget that! But that was one of the points of the film, in a way."[23]

Hitchcock shot long unbroken takes lasting up to 10 minutes (the length of a film camera magazine) involving carefully choreographed camera and actor movement, though most shots in the film wound up being shorter.[24] Every other segment ends by panning against or tracking into an object—a man's jacket blocking the entire screen, or the back of a piece of furniture, for example. In this way, Hitchcock effectively masked half the cuts in the film.[25]

However, at the end of 20 minutes (two magazines of film make one reel of film on the projector in the movie theater), the projectionist—when the film was shown in theaters—had to change reels. On these changeovers, Hitchcock cuts to a new camera setup, deliberately not disguising the cut. A description of the beginning and end of each segment follows.

Shot from the film's trailer

Hitchcock told François Truffaut in the book-length Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon & Schuster, 1967) that he ended up re-shooting the last four or five segments because he was dissatisfied with the color of the sunset.

Hitchcock used this long-take approach again to a lesser extent on his next film, Under Capricorn (1949), and in a very limited way in his film Stage Fright (1950).

Hitchcock's cameo appearance as a red neon sign, in the far distance, with his famous profile above the word "Reduco", a fictitious weight-loss product

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearance is a signature occurrence in most of his films. At 55:19 into the film, a red neon sign in the far background showing Hitchcock's trademark profile starts blinking. As the guests are escorted to the door, actors Joan Chandler and Douglas Dick stop to have a few words and the sign flashes in the background several times.

There is some debate as to whether Hitchcock makes another cameo earlier in the film. In the making-of documentary, Rope Unleashed, Arthur Laurents says that Hitchcock can be seen walking down the Manhattan street immediately after the title sequence.[26] The individual significantly resembles Hitchcock, yet some believe that it is a myth. In The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas M. Leitch claims that the production records in the Warner Bros. archive show that the neon sign is Hitchcock's only appearance in the entire film.

The production credits on the film were as follows:

• Director – Alfred Hitchcock
• Writing – Arthur Laurents (screenplay), Hume Cronyn (adaptation)
• Cinematography – Joseph Valentine and William V. Skall (directors of photography)
• Art direction – Perry Ferguson (art director), Emile Kuri and Howard Bristol (set decorators)
• Technicolor color director – Natalie Kalmus
• Production manager – Fred Ahern
• Film editor – William H. Ziegler
• Assistant director – Lowell J. Farrell
• Makeup artist – Perc Westmore
• Operators of camera movement – Edward Fitzgerald, Paul G. Hill, Richard Emmons, Morris Rosen
• Sound – Al Riggs
• Lighting technician – Jim Potevin
• Music – Leo F. Forbstein (musical director), The Three Suns (radio sequence)
• Costumes – Adrian (Miss Chandler's dress)

According to Warner Bros. records, the film earned $2,028,000 domestically and $720,000 overseas.[3]

Contemporary reviews were mixed. Variety magazine wrote,

"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."[27]

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times found that 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".[28]

The Chicago Tribune's Mae Tinee was candid about her reactions:

"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."[29]

John McCarten of The New Yorker wrote,

"In addition to the fact that it has little or no movement, 'Rope' is handicapped by some of the most relentlessly arch dialogue you ever heard."[30]

The Monthly Film Bulletin found that the actors,

"for the most part, are excellent" but that "as a film, much of the suspense of the story and the drama of the original written material has been lost because the continual movement within a confined space, although more fluid, is slower and more tiring to watch than a film which has been edited by the conventional method".[31]

Harrison's Reports gave the film a very positive review, calling it

"an exceptionally fine psychological thriller" with "excellent" acting and "an ingenious technique, and under Hitchcock's superb handling it serves to heighten the atmosphere of mounting suspense and suspicion".[32]

Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times wrote,

"It is unusual enough to shine more as a technical tour de force than as a moving sort of film ... The interesting experimental values in this Hitchcock production could never be denied, yet I would not rate it one of his best."[33]

In Time magazine's 1948 review, the play that the film was based on is called an "intelligent and hideously exciting melodrama" though "in turning it into a movie for mass distribution, much of the edge [is] blunted" explaining:

Much of the play's deadly excitement dwelt in [the] juxtaposition of callow brilliance and lavender dandyism with moral idiocy and brutal horror. Much of its intensity came from the shocking change in the teacher, once he learned what was going on. In the movie, the boys and their teacher are shrewdly plausible but much more conventional types. Even so, the basic idea is so good and, in its diluted way, Rope is so well done that it makes a rattling good melodrama.[34]

On its theatrical release in 1948, Rope performed poorly at the box office. In Rope Unleashed, screenwriter Arthur Laurents attributed this failure to audience uneasiness with the homosexual undertones in the relationship between the two lead characters.[26]

Nearly 36 years later, Vincent Canby, also of The New York Times, called the "seldom seen" and "underrated" film "full of the kind of self-conscious epigrams and breezy ripostes that once defined wit and decadence in the Broadway theater"; it's a film "less concerned with the characters and their moral dilemmas than with how they look, sound and move, and with the overall spectacle of how a perfect crime goes wrong".[15]

Roger Ebert wrote 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 ...."[11]

A BBC review of the DVD release, in 2001, called the film "technically and socially bold" and pointed out that given "how primitive the Technicolor process was back then", the DVD's image quality is "by those standards quite astonishing"; the release's "2.0 mono mix" was clear and reasonably strong, though "distortion creeps into the music".[35]

Rope holds a score of 92% on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes based on 52 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "As formally audacious as it is narratively brilliant, Rope connects a powerful ensemble in service of a darkly satisfying crime thriller from a master of the genre".[36] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average, reports a score of 73 out of 100 based on reviews from 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[37]

• Neimi, Robert (2006). History in the Media: Film and Television. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 1-57607-952-X.