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Boston Globe (15/Jun/1984) - Rope

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Rope

Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" has its points, but they're the kind we admire from a distance. Made in 1948, it has more historical value than entertainment value. It was Hitchcock's first color film, and it's notable for a few technical innovations, but Hitchcock never quite makes artifice seem to work for him here. "Rope" was taken from a play written in 1929 by Patrick Hamilton and based on a famous murder case in which two students, Leopold and Loeb, were found guilty of killing a third. It was termed a thrill killing, but the play, set in the living room where the crime is committed, seems cold and stagy. The film seems even more so, by design.

Lunar and airless, it takes place in actual time, the 80 minutes from the killing to the payoff, and Hitchcock made the claustrophobic atmosphere of the single-set play seem one of the characters. He jettisoned his usual strategies of cutting, and filmed "Rope" in continuous 10-minute takes (10 minutes' worth of film was the most a camera could hold in 1948). By carefully joining those takes, Hitchcock created the illusion of a seamless flow. The gliding, almost slithery, camera also feeds the air of hothouse decadence in which the crime is steeped.

Farley Granger, as the high-strung young pianist whose heart really isn't in the killing, is the more sympathetic of the two murderers. John Dall, as the more callous and arrogant of the pair, is set up to be disliked. But a few unforeseen things creep out from around the edges of the film's conventional structuring, partly because it had to suppress the obvious homosexual implications of the situation. Dall is the active party when he's with Granger, but he's passive when in the company of Jimmy Stewart, the mentor figure he wants to impress.

Stewart's performance (his first for Hitchcock) is a real curio, and far from entirely satisfying. It was a provocative idea to cast Stewart against type as the pompous snob of a professor who, just after Hitler's defeat, advocates the idea of a race of supermen whose superiority entitles them to murder with impunity. He plays detective, bullying his proteges, but his teachings are, in a sense, the source of the murder, and his horrified disclaimer at the end hardly gets him off the moral hook. Ultimately, he's more arrogant than they, and his smug complacency is more profoundly disturbing.

Stewart projects resoluteness, but can't impart enough bite to the glibly monstrous prof. While Dall is too brittle to engage us, he's the only complex character and the only interesting one. His ambivalence is intriguing. When Stewart reverses himself and becomes the spokesman for the film's essentially anti-intellectual viewpoint, we feel Dall's been betrayed. With all its frequently stilted dialogue, "Rope" expresses itself most tellingly, and with more stylistic muscle, by the fact that the immaculately groomed stranglers don't even need to loosen their carefully knotted ties in order to kill. Hitchcock later made blatant artifice work brilliantly in "Rear Window," with its stage-set microcosm. Here's where it started.

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