The Perfect Murder?

 Rope (1948) – Two wealthy young men decide to commit the perfect crime.  Everything is playing out perfectly, with the exception of the man who inspired the crime.

Director – Alfred Hitchcock                                Starring – Jimmy Stewart, Farley Granger, John Dall

Why I Liked It – Hitchcock in his prime can overcome any obstacle, even himself.

Once upon a time several of the greatest movies Alfred Hitchcock ever directed were unavailable to the public.  For thirty years, you couldn’t watch “Rear Window”, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, “The Trouble With Harry”, “Vertigo”, and “Rope”.  The great director had bought the rights to the movies back from the studios, and left them in his will to his daughter.  It took decades for them to reappear.  My bet is that, like me, you know all those titles but the last one.  There’s a reason for that.  The other four are very-good-bordering-on-great-movies, or great movies.  “Rope” is only a good one.  All because Hitchcock took a risk.

The movie is shot in ten long takes, up to ten minutes each.  This was a novelty for a major motion picture.  The camera of the day could only hold ten minutes of film, so as the camera ran out, Hitchcock would have it pass behind something, “blacking out” the scene.  They’d stop, put more film in the camera and do the next scene.  This required all kinds of unusual things to happen.  Furniture, even walls needed to move so the camera could follow the action along, even from one room to the next.  The crew had to move silently out of sight taking care of all of this.  The actors had to get long stretches of dialogue and action letter perfect, or the whole thing had to start again from the beginning!  (Imagine messing up at the nine minute mark of a scene.  Everyone would hate you.)  Eventually they got ten takes, for a movie that runs about an hour and twenty minutes.

And the whole thing doesn’t quite work.  Even Hitchcock agreed.  When all was said and done, he called it a stunt.  It feels weird the first couple times, then you expect and can ignore it.  But it brings nothing interesting or useful to the story.  A lot of work, for very little payoff.

The good news is that rest of the movie is very good.  Jimmy Stewart plays against type here (he would name this role as his least favorite of his career), as a smug, superficial headmaster who became the idol of one of the murderers.  He specializes in the kind of shallow, pseudo-intellectual nonsense that is commonly found among more than a few of us when we were young.  Granger and Dall are chilling as the two young who take their inspiration from their idol to commit an atrocity.  They kill a classmate, and then play a loathsome trick on the boys family, and their friends at a dinner party.  The characters are based on the ‘Leopold and Loeb’ case of the 1920s.  The rest of the cast are play their parts with polish, as well.

At the end, “Rope” loses its way a little, but overall, Hitchcock’s first color film is worth the look.

Rating – **** Recommended