Review: Rope

Two smug university roommates (Farley Granger and John Dall) strangle a mutual friend with the rope of the title. Simply because they could, and they felt superior to him. Then they throw a party in their apartment for friends and colleagues, with the body chucked into a chest that they use for a table during the party. They even invite the victim’s father (Cedric Hardwicke) to the party. The two smug pricks also invite their old university professor (James Stewart), whose theories about intellectual superiority/inferiority have unwittingly inspired their unlawful, violent deed. Joan Chandler plays the girlfriend of the deceased.

 

When Sir Alfred Hitchcock swings and misses, it’s still generally worth a look anyway. So it is with this 1948 failed experiment from The Master resembling somewhat the real-life Leopold and Loeb murder case. The film flopped and even Hitch himself felt it didn’t quite come off, but this long-take exercise still has enough charms to be worth a gander. It just doesn’t quite come off.

 

The central premise is pretty irresistible and James Stewart instantly and effortlessly steals the show as the cluey college professor who slowly starts to become suspicious of his students, especially Granger who is a visible nervous wreck. Cedric Hardwicke lends a touch of class too in a fairly small role, and Joan Chandler is quite lovely and incandescent as well. It’s a shame she didn’t do very many films, and like Dall died in her 50s. Gone far too soon in my view. Farley Granger was never a great actor, but here is well-cast as the more anxious of the two arrogant murderers. However, a little of John Dall goes plenty far enough for me thank you very much. Don’t get me wrong. He’s not bad, and gets the smugness down pat (as well as the seeming euphoria from getting away with the crime), he’s just overly arch for my tastes and it wears thin fairly quickly. His best moment is when he finally shuts the hell up while someone basically goes scorched Earth on his snooty, smug arse. I did find it interesting that not only were the real-life Leopold and Loeb gay, Dall was gay, Granger was either gay or bisexual, and screenwriter Arthur Laurents (“The Way We Were”, “The Turning Point”) was Granger’s lover at the time of filming. You don’t get a whole lot of sense of any of that on screen, however. This was 1948 after all.

 

Unfortunately the film is too talky and stagey for me, and Hitchcock was seemingly too concerned with careful camera movements (covering for sneaky edits) to notice the flaws. As for those camera movements, you ain’t fooling anyone, Mr. Hitchcock. You can see the edits from a mile away. I get that he wasn’t attempting a film with zero edits (just long takes), but he did attempt to make the film look like a play with as few cuts as possible, and wanted to hide them. That didn’t work. So he didn’t even pull off the experiment on a technical level let alone make a great film out of the idea. I did like one funny bit where nearly every male movie star of the time is rattled off except Stewart. That was rather cute. I also liked some of the darkly humorous dialogue about murder and superiority etc. It’s very Hitchcock. On the whole though, it’s too talky and too slim. You feel like Hitchcock and Laurents could’ve and should’ve done more with what is a pretty fascinating real-life murder case (though I don’t think I’ve yet seen a wholly satisfying film based on the case, “Compulsion” coming closest).

 

A slightly failed cinematic experiment that will no doubt be someone’s favourite Hitchcock film. For me it’s sometimes interesting and fairly well-acted, but stagey and middle of the pack Hitchcock. Stewart and Chandler are terrific support players, however. Based on a Patrick Hamilton play adapted by actor Hume Cronyn (who acted for Hitch in “Shadow of a Doubt” and “Lifeboat”, both superior films) before Laurents turned it into a screenplay.

 

Rating: C+