Rope (

1948

)

Hitchcock was, at heart, a shameless show-off. He loved films in a close, confined space, like Lifeboat (1944) and Rear Window (1954), because of the unique challenges that they presented. He liked to show that with directorial flourishes he could keep these static environments not only compelling but downright thrilling. Rope could be described as one of these claustrophobic movies as well, though it's nowhere near as confined as Lifeboat (1944) as it's set in a rather spacious Manhattan penthouse. However, to add to the challenge of filming, Hitchcock decided to film the entire movie in a series of very long takes (about ten minutes at a time). The logistics of managing all the actors moving in-and-out of the frame are daunting in-and-of-themselves and is probably why the film loses some of the director's trademark idiosyncrasies. Still, the fact that Rope's camerawork is as dynamic and interesting as it serves as further proof as if we needed any, of Hitchcock's skill behind the camera. The director wants the viewer to see what he's doing too because when he does have a cut he makes it as obvious as possible, zooming right into someone's back till the whole screen goes black. One long take might have gone unnoticed by a less observant viewer, but nobody in the audience missed that transition.

The story, loosely based on the Leopold and Loeb murder in the mid-1920s, follows two self-professed “superior men” Brandon and Philip, who as a lark strangle their college classmate David. They then hide his body in a chest, and with the body still hidden in the apartment they invite David's parents, his girlfriend Joan, and his best friend Kenneth over for a dinner party. Once all the guests depart they'll take the body up-state and toss it in a lake. It's a daring plan, no doubt, but it's fundamentally a solid plot for murder. Indeed, if Brandon had stuck to the original plan the pair would have doubtlessly gotten away with it. Unfortunately for them, Brandon is as natural a show-off as Hitchcock, so he also invited the only man in the world who might be able to guess what they've done and why they did it to the party: Their old House Master from school, Rupert Cadell.

You see, Cadell was the one who originally planted the idea of this whole murder in the minds of Brandon and Philip, though quite by accident. Cadell is a morose intellectual, with a dark sense of humor that leads him to playfully theorize about a world where superior men are allowed to kill off “lesser beings.” Cadell seems to regards this philosophy as little more than a lark, an interesting idea to play with. He is completely ignorant as to how much of an impact his ideal musings had on Brandon and Philip. It's an interesting dynamic that you don't usually see in media about nihilistic murders. Crime and Punishment had Raskolnikov come up with his theories about murder after sitting around in his cramped room for a month stewing in negative thoughts. Nor did the titular thief in Pickpocket (1959) get his ideas of moral thievery second-hand from some disinterested mentor figure. Here the one who came up with the idea of justifiable homicide was just chewing the fat, blissfully unaware that he was being taken seriously. It's a good lesson for all public intellectuals, and especially those charged with raising and instructing children. Moreover, it's a more realistic depiction, as seldom do the disturbed youthful nihilists reach their sick conclusions all on their own. Despite their assurances that they are superior intellectual figures, they are seldom that creative and instead usually latch-on desperately to the ideas of others.

Once the body is hidden and the party gets into full swing a game of cat-and-mouse (but which one's the cat and which one's the mouse?) begins, though at first Cadell doesn't even realize that he's playing at all. In short order, Brandon and Philip reveal that they are very far short of being the ubermensch that they envision themselves as. Philip is scared shitless by the whole affair, and positively breaks down when he sees the murder weapon, a length of household rope, dangling from the chest where the body is stashed. Brandon, at least initially, seems much more in possession of himself. However, the damn fool cannot help but constantly tip his hand to the party guests. First, he suggests to Kenneth that he's got a chance with Joan, even though she's all but engaged to David. Then he insists on wrapping up a stack of books he's giving to David's father with the murder weapon, knowing full well the sight of the damn thing will send Philip into a veritable fit. Indeed, his decision to invite Rupert to the party in the first place proves to be the pair's ultimate undoing, because Rupert gradually realizes what is going on, much to his horror.

These guys are immensely believable in the role of self-appointed supermen who kill lesser beings with impunity. Nobody that seriously considers himself that far removed from the rest of humanity is anything but pathetic. How could they be? A real superior man wouldn't need to daydream about homicide, as he'd be too busy trying to better, if not the world, then at least his place in it. The two actors, John Dall and Farley Granger portray this pitifulness with admirable skill. It's obvious from the start that the pair are building themselves up and taking on a role that neither is comfortable in, yet they are content to wear the mask of intellectual and moral superiority so long as they see fit. As the party winds down and Cadell gets closer and closer to the truth we see the duo's tenuous grasp on themselves wear thinner and thinner, till they are all but reduced to helpless tears of frustration and rage. They are such repugnant figures that I cannot help but take some measure of joy in their gradual downfall.

I have to wonder, how much more frightening, how much more unnerving, and how much more moving this film would have been, had it been made a scant 15 years earlier. In 1933, the world was mostly ignorant of the horrors that the new totalitarian regimes. Few realized to what devilish lengths the German Fascists were willing to take their insane racial science. Many well-informed people simply writing off the virulent antisemitism exposed by the Nazi Party was merely a crass way of appealing to working-class supports; a mask to dropped at the earliest convenience. The mass killings in the USSR were closer at hand, with political killing already a reality under Stalin's rule and the engineered famines ravaging much of the Ukraine. However, there were plenty in positions of power and influence who were more than willing to overlook, and at times actively cover-up these atrocities for the sake of ideology and personal political gain. In such an atmosphere as this, the notion of two students putting Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov's theories about murder to a real-world test would have cut far closer to the bone. After all, these ideas or superior men doing as they please to the inferior masses were a veritable plague upon the world at this point, seeing them refuted and humiliated on-screen would have been a rare treat for all those moviegoers who didn't style themselves as Super Men. Perhaps it would have been too grotesque and too poignant for a major Hollywood production to tackle, but I could think of few filmmakers more able to slip it by than cinema's most successful purveyor of hidden perversion and depravity, Alfred Hitchcock.

However, in 1948 the picture of the ground was vastly different. Most of the men ages 21-40 in the film's audience would have played an active role in stopping just the sort of practical nihilism that the villains now carried out onscreen. Those in the audience that hadn't served as soldiers almost certainly contributed in some other way, either as nurses, in manufacturing war machines, or just buying war bonds. If ever a film going public could boast of defeating the insane theories exposed by Brandon and Philip, then it was the ones gathered to watch Rope when it premiered. Hell, Jimmy Stewart himself (the actor playing Rupert Cadell) saw active service as a bomber pilot during WWII. As a result, the film feels less like an invective against a festering evil, and more like a victory lap for a triumphant populace. The tension of the film is deflated somewhat by the fact that the audience watching when the film was first screened knew how the story turned out. The more vicious forms of nihilism were crushed by those who treasured the inherent worth and dignity of all human life. As a result, I suspect that original play, first performed in 1929, would have made more of an impact.

Though in this sense, audiences today are in a somewhat better place than their peers 70 years ago. Extremist viewpoints which hold that certain types of people are more worthy of life than others have once again crept their way back into the cultural mainstream. From pitiful video essayists who hold that it's a grave misfortune that Nazis gave eugenics a bad name, to the buffoons who parade around as fascist LARPers, extremist nihilists are more visible now than ever. Just scan some popular fan reviews of this film on letterboxd and imdb, and count how often the nihilistic utterance “be gay, do crimes” is recorded. That so many otherwise intelligent people can take this away from Rope only shows how warped their viewpoints have become. Brandon and Philip are pitiful buffoons whose only incompetence and arrogance get them caught committing what should have been a simple crime. That they are (probably, remember this is 1948 and a Hollywood production, there are some things you can only hint at) gay is not what makes them either despicable or so pathetic. They are two losers with delusions of grandeur who, allegedly, screw each other. That an incidental identity trait takes such precedent in the minds of reviewers is depressing when one considers the state of artistic analysis in this age. It's downright frightening when you see people attempting to excuse a pointless and cruel murder because of the superficial traits of the murderers.