The cold hard fact: Alfred Hitchcock was big. One could even say he was famous, holding an incredible influence on the then-adolescent art of filmmaking and a consistent commercial and critical appeal through the major part of his career, and they would be right. Much like fellow legend and frozen-pea enthusiast Orson Welles, Hitchcock helped to raise the public perception of film directors from mere names on a screen to full-fledged icons, able to match the star-power of the actors (in some cases, obviously). Unlike Welles however, Mr. Hitchcock was not an actor nor ever made an effort to be, outside of the hosting segments of his popular television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents perhaps, yet his trademark look and peculiar brand of charisma placed him firmly in the pop-culture of the mid-20th century. It’s hard to mistake a Hitchcock film: the macabre sense of humor, the witty dialogue, the masterful sense of pacing, whether it was a thriller or a comedy wasn’t really separated from the other. Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest, Rear Window...looking back on it now is like looking through Michael Jordan’s career in the 90s, ‘masterpieces’ in layman’s terms.
So of course I haven’t seen any Hitchcock movies.
Well that’s not entirely true. I had seen the beginning portions of The Birds, a pioneer in the ‘random animals attack small town’ genre (see also: Frogs, Piranha, Slugs) and probably the only good thing to come out of a portly British man chucking birds at Tippi Hedren’s face. While an interesting film, the B-movie concept done well, I never ended up finishing it for reasons that absolutely did not involve birds in any way. I didn’t really have any compulsion to watch it either, even when I had decided to get back into the watching/writing film game, just a complete lack of enthusiasm on my part to write about this film that’s had 40 years of the critical eye placed upon it (which I didn’t think about when considering Psycho or Vertigo, so maybe I have an unconscious bias against that movie for some unknown reason). To cut a short story even shorter, I decided to go with a A.H. film that’s maybe a little bit under the radar that still holds a fine reputation. Because we should always watch films based on hearsay.
Rope starts off the proceedings with a bang, most good films often do, as within the first few minutes we seen a man get totally strangled, by a rope even. The strangled man is David, and the stranglers are Philip and Brandon (Farley Granger and John Dall, respectively), Dave’s former schoolmates and the type of well-to-do white people that only really existed in the 1940s. Philip is a little shaken up by the whole thing, but Brandon is entirely too excited, for reasons that we’ll get into a bit later down the page. They stuff Dave’s corpse into a drawer in the center of the room, placing candlesticks such upon it to keep the housekeeper from digging into and to otherwise make it more presentable. There’s to be a party you see, and Brandon has invited a plethora of interesting guests that just so happen to have a connection to David, including his relatives, his fiancee Janet Walker, his former friend and Janet’s ex-boyfriend Kenneth and Rupert Cadell (James Stewart, a recurring name in the Hitchcock filmography), their former teacher. Of course the reasonable thing would be to cancel the party so one could focus on disposing of the body, never mind not murdering anyone in the first place, but Brandon is not the type to just cancel a party on account of death. They’ll just have it in the front room. In front of the box holding their dead friend. Waiting for him to show up. What a magical night eh?
So Rope is in essence a whodunit that’s already been solved, a one-sided murder mystery to coin a phrase. We know who killed David, and we know that Brandon and Philip are going to get their just desserts in the end, we the audience are just waiting to see it happen. Hitchcock dances around it beautifully too, drawing out the tension, dropping the hints, always keeping the partygoers on the edge of realization (and the audience on the edges of our seats). Tension is the name of the game, and a helpful portion of that is the fact that this is a ‘bottle movie’ (a movie centered entirely on one location), and the fact that it’s done in one take in one continuous shot. Although the set is fairly roomy, the fact that our attention is unceasingly connected to someone serves to make it feel a tad claustrophobic, while also keeping you on your toes waiting for any sort of slip-up by Brandon and Philip to bring the whole thing down. I’ve always believed that a director who understands how to effectively use tension is about a step away from a great film, and Hitchcock is the go-to guy for that. It’s almost like “The Tell-Tale Heart” in a way, at least in Philip’s case, who seems to be in a perpetual state of crapping his own heart out.
What does a man do with his life that deems we to end it? Who has the right to judge over the forces of life and death, if anybody? The philosophy of Social Darwinism is the major theme of Rope, variations of which are espoused by Brandon and Rupert throughout the movie. Remember that this film was set and released in 1948, a scant three years after the end of World War II and that little campaign of genocide known as the Holocaust. While we in the present are removed from that by several decades, the idea of people spouting off quotations from Mein Kampf is similar to someone starting up an Osama Bin Laden fan club in 2004. So the moral of the story is a little transparent (you shouldn’t kill people folks), and certainly one that is incredibly easy to hamfist all up in your story, but it never really feels heavy-handed for my tastes. Plenty of that credit goes to the actors of course, particularly James Stewart and John Dall, who slip into their roles of darwinian teacher and asshole almost effortlessly. Despite the movie having the the ‘it’s a play’ feeling to it (because it was, by Patrick Hamilton), the characters feel real to me. A film done right, I guess.
I don’t know if films by one of the most celebrated directors can count as ‘underrated’ or ‘obscure’, but if it can I’d say Rope is an obscure underrated gem. If you’re interested into getting into Hitchcock, might as well add this one to your list after you’ve gotten through the big-names. Just don’t strangle people okay? You’re not Hitler.
Result: Recommended
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