Rope

MOVIE #1,950 • SCORE 10/10 • 09.06.24
SERIES: ALFRED HITCHCOCK DIRECTOR FOCUS

3 lost works, 8 silent films, and 25 talkies into this series on Alfred Hitchcock and we’ve finally stumbled on the first of what should be several 10/10 classics. This is perhaps most noteworthy for being cinema’s first one-shot, real-time movie (it’s actually four shots, and even those are stitched together long takes, but the sentiment remains). But it’s more than just novel trickery. Rope boasts what has to be the best screenplay (by Arthur Laurents, from a story by Hume Cronyn) to date. This is still devilishly fun more than 75 years later…


This features the first of four collaborations with Jimmy Stewart over the ensuing decade, who just might be my favorite actor ever. He’s great here, but every bit his equal are the actual leads of the picture: John Dall and Farley Granger. The film’s also notable for featuring what’s clearly two homosexual characters (the aforementioned leads, in not so subtle subtext), though this fact was completely lost on the censors, contemporary critique, and the general public at the time.

I liked how they displayed the end credits cast list, with every character’s relationship to the deceased victim…


We’re just past the halfway point of this filmography focus and there are plenty of bangers left to come.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,949 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,951 ⫸

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Rope is a 1948 American psychological crime thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the 1929 play of the same name by Patrick Hamilton. The film was adapted by Hume Cronyn with a screenplay by Arthur Laurents. The film was produced by Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions. Starring James Stewart, John Dall and Farley Granger, this is the first of Hitchcock's Technicolor films, and is notable for taking place in real time and being edited so as to appear as four long shots through the use of stitched-together long takes. It is the second of Hitchcock's "limited setting" films, the first being Lifeboat (1944). The original play 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. It was released on July 12, 2024.