Rope is generally regarded as one of Hitchcock's failures, but many reviewers on this site have attempted to rescue its reputation. I find their arguments interesting but not convincing. There is too much wrong with this picture. The source material is weak, the screenplay is inadequate, the casting is hopeless and Hitchcock's technical experiment is misconceived.
I have never seen it, but Hamilton's play probably ran about two hours. Hitchcock has trimmed it to a brisk 75 minutes. However, this undermines his decision to 'preserve the unities', because the whole party scene is now unrealistically abbreviated. It also means that information is given in such a rush that very little of the sub-text is actually on screen.
The play is based on a classic 'folie a deux', where two people form a bond against the rest of the world and egg each other on to do something that neither would have done alone. In this case, the killers' antagonism is partly rooted in their sense of rejection and isolation as homosexuals in a censorious society.
It is also about a schoolteacher's moral crisis as he comes to realise that his cynically playful philosophical speculations have been taken seriously, with tragic results.
However, by beginning the story with the murder the actual relationship between Brandon and Phillip is never really explored and the homosexual undertones are so deeply buried as to be effectively non-existent. Instead, the relationship and its consequences have to be explained retrospectively though stolidly expository dialogue. Similarly, Rupert's background, character and former relationship with the killers is hardly touched on and he has barely expounded his cynical views when he is forced to recant them.
The focus of the story, therefore, shifts from the characters and their relationships to Rupert's suspicions about what has happened. Consequently, the suspense is mostly to do with whether the killers can get through the evening without anyone discovering the body in the trunk.
In short: the movie is interested in the inherent suspense of the situation, rather than in how that situation came about, or how it affects the people involved.
This would be OK, except that much of suspense lies in the verbal duels between Rupert and Brandon, but they are not very well written. The dialogue is generally very flat and prosaic. There is a lot of it, but it is strictly functional and there is scarcely a line that really sparkles with wit or menace. As a result we get no sense that Rupert is an aloof armchair philosopher who enjoys outraging convention with his wild free-thinking, or that Brandon is a clever, bitter psychopath. A psychopath, yes: but clever?
This is not helped by the casting.
Jimmy Stewart was a competent actor, but clearly miscast. He is too folksy to play a character like Rupert. We believe his shocked denunciation of Brandon at the end, but not his earlier pseudo-Nietzchean speculations. The part had been turned down by Cary Grant (who would also have been a disaster) and should probably have been offered to someone like Ray Milland, Frederick March, James Mason or George Sanders.
At 30, John Dall seems too old for Brandon. He comes across as arrogant and rather stupid. The screenplay saddles him with an irritating stutter which he uses throughout. He would have fared better if someone had simply told him to use it more sparingly (only when under pressure) but nobody did.
Farley Granger was a limited actor and it shows. He plays Phillip all on the same note and his continual panic is both wearing and implausible. We never believe in his relationship with Brandon because it has effectively broken down by the time the movie begins. How he came to acquiesce in Brandon's murder plan is a profound mystery. We can only speculate how things might have turned out if Montgomery Clift had accepted either of the two main parts.
Nobody else registers.
To make these performances work, despite the miscasting and the inadequacies of the screenplay, Hitchcock needed to spend a lot of time with the actors, but his attention was elsewhere.
This was not the first play he had shot. In the early Thirties, he had filmed Juno and the Paycock in a very conventional way. Here he wanted to do something different: to shoot it in 'real time' with a single camera and no editing. He could have elected to have his camera tracking up and down outside the set, shooting through the 'forth wall' and simply recording the actors, but that is not how he liked to work. At heart, Hitchcock always remained a silent movie maker. He liked to tell a story visually and manipulate the audience's response through his choice of lenses, camera angles, framing and lighting of shots, tracking, panning and editing.
In Rope he wanted to discard editing but retain everything else. This would have been feasible if he had access to a Steadicam, but he didn't. What he had instead was a massive Technicolor camera dollying through the set in eight or nine minute takes. This was a huge logistical challenge that occupied all of Hitchcock's attention and energy. He managed to achieve some striking and revealing set-ups, but the camera has to plod ponderously from one to the other so that the overall pacing is noticeably draggy.
Meanwhile, his actors are left struggling with their inappropriate and underwritten parts, trying to give engrossing performances while stepping over cables and watching an army of stage hands pull the set apart in front of Hitchcock's lumbering Technicolor juggernaut.
Rope usually gets a mention in any overview of Hitchcock's work on the basis that it is an interesting experiment. In fact, it is an uninteresting experiment. There are great Hitchcock pictures, good ones and not-so-good ones, but he only made a handful of boring movies.
Rope is one of them.
I have never seen it, but Hamilton's play probably ran about two hours. Hitchcock has trimmed it to a brisk 75 minutes. However, this undermines his decision to 'preserve the unities', because the whole party scene is now unrealistically abbreviated. It also means that information is given in such a rush that very little of the sub-text is actually on screen.
The play is based on a classic 'folie a deux', where two people form a bond against the rest of the world and egg each other on to do something that neither would have done alone. In this case, the killers' antagonism is partly rooted in their sense of rejection and isolation as homosexuals in a censorious society.
It is also about a schoolteacher's moral crisis as he comes to realise that his cynically playful philosophical speculations have been taken seriously, with tragic results.
However, by beginning the story with the murder the actual relationship between Brandon and Phillip is never really explored and the homosexual undertones are so deeply buried as to be effectively non-existent. Instead, the relationship and its consequences have to be explained retrospectively though stolidly expository dialogue. Similarly, Rupert's background, character and former relationship with the killers is hardly touched on and he has barely expounded his cynical views when he is forced to recant them.
The focus of the story, therefore, shifts from the characters and their relationships to Rupert's suspicions about what has happened. Consequently, the suspense is mostly to do with whether the killers can get through the evening without anyone discovering the body in the trunk.
In short: the movie is interested in the inherent suspense of the situation, rather than in how that situation came about, or how it affects the people involved.
This would be OK, except that much of suspense lies in the verbal duels between Rupert and Brandon, but they are not very well written. The dialogue is generally very flat and prosaic. There is a lot of it, but it is strictly functional and there is scarcely a line that really sparkles with wit or menace. As a result we get no sense that Rupert is an aloof armchair philosopher who enjoys outraging convention with his wild free-thinking, or that Brandon is a clever, bitter psychopath. A psychopath, yes: but clever?
This is not helped by the casting.
Jimmy Stewart was a competent actor, but clearly miscast. He is too folksy to play a character like Rupert. We believe his shocked denunciation of Brandon at the end, but not his earlier pseudo-Nietzchean speculations. The part had been turned down by Cary Grant (who would also have been a disaster) and should probably have been offered to someone like Ray Milland, Frederick March, James Mason or George Sanders.
At 30, John Dall seems too old for Brandon. He comes across as arrogant and rather stupid. The screenplay saddles him with an irritating stutter which he uses throughout. He would have fared better if someone had simply told him to use it more sparingly (only when under pressure) but nobody did.
Farley Granger was a limited actor and it shows. He plays Phillip all on the same note and his continual panic is both wearing and implausible. We never believe in his relationship with Brandon because it has effectively broken down by the time the movie begins. How he came to acquiesce in Brandon's murder plan is a profound mystery. We can only speculate how things might have turned out if Montgomery Clift had accepted either of the two main parts.
Nobody else registers.
To make these performances work, despite the miscasting and the inadequacies of the screenplay, Hitchcock needed to spend a lot of time with the actors, but his attention was elsewhere.
This was not the first play he had shot. In the early Thirties, he had filmed Juno and the Paycock in a very conventional way. Here he wanted to do something different: to shoot it in 'real time' with a single camera and no editing. He could have elected to have his camera tracking up and down outside the set, shooting through the 'forth wall' and simply recording the actors, but that is not how he liked to work. At heart, Hitchcock always remained a silent movie maker. He liked to tell a story visually and manipulate the audience's response through his choice of lenses, camera angles, framing and lighting of shots, tracking, panning and editing.
In Rope he wanted to discard editing but retain everything else. This would have been feasible if he had access to a Steadicam, but he didn't. What he had instead was a massive Technicolor camera dollying through the set in eight or nine minute takes. This was a huge logistical challenge that occupied all of Hitchcock's attention and energy. He managed to achieve some striking and revealing set-ups, but the camera has to plod ponderously from one to the other so that the overall pacing is noticeably draggy.
Meanwhile, his actors are left struggling with their inappropriate and underwritten parts, trying to give engrossing performances while stepping over cables and watching an army of stage hands pull the set apart in front of Hitchcock's lumbering Technicolor juggernaut.
Rope usually gets a mention in any overview of Hitchcock's work on the basis that it is an interesting experiment. In fact, it is an uninteresting experiment. There are great Hitchcock pictures, good ones and not-so-good ones, but he only made a handful of boring movies.
Rope is one of them.