Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope is a tense, unsettling thriller with a camera experiment that sometimes gets in its way. John Dall and Farley Granger keep the people worth watching when the long takes threaten to distract us.
Alfred Hitchcock lets us see the murder before the guests arrive, which dispenses with the usual business of suspects. We know what Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan have done; the interest lies in how they behave while entertaining people who do not. Rope is a good thriller, particularly when its hosts disagree about how much danger they can bear. Its determination to make the evening appear continuous is ingenious, though not always helpful.
John Dall plays Brandon with a pleasure in his own cleverness that makes his hospitality unpleasant well before it becomes risky. Farley Granger gives Phillip a nervousness that Brandon seems to regard as bad manners. The chest containing David Kentley becomes a buffet table, and guests are invited to eat from it. We felt queasy at that piece of hosting: the practical preparations make the cruelty worse, because Brandon has thought about how to enjoy it.
William V. Skall and Joseph A. Valentine keep the camera mobile, allowing us to watch one exchange develop into another without the relief of a cut. The long takes give Dall and Granger time to make their different responses uncomfortable. They also give us time to admire how the camera gets from one position to the next. That is the difficulty: we occasionally stop worrying about discovery and start wondering where the camera will go.
William H. Ziegler’s editing works to preserve that apparent continuity, but the effort can become conspicuous. The sustained takes teach us to look for the joins, so the trick sometimes creates precisely the distraction it needs to avoid. A conventional cut could occasionally show us a reaction more directly. The actors do not always benefit from having to sustain a scene for quite so long.
The chest is more useful to the suspense than some of that movement. Having food laid over a body gives even an ordinary social action an unpleasant implication, without anyone needing to explain it. Arthur Laurents’s screenplay supplies plenty of explanation nonetheless, especially when the conversation turns to intellectual superiority. The performances make the idea of these men believing themselves exceptional unpleasant enough; the talk sometimes gives their opinions more attention than they deserve.
James Stewart, as Rupert Cadell, helps by making intelligence look like the habit of paying attention. His dry delivery gives the conversation some needed ease, and we believe in his capacity to unsettle Brandon. The performance keeps some amusement in a film whose cleverness can otherwise become airless. We could have used more of that ease from the writing, which too often sounds arranged for an audience rather than spoken between people.
The pleasure of a confined thriller is being able to follow each small change in who knows what, and Rope mostly gives us that pleasure. Its concentration on the hosts makes the threat of an ordinary question sufficient to hold our attention. At 81 minutes, it stops before the experiment becomes exhausting. It is worth an evening for Dall and Granger, though we would not blame anyone for occasionally wishing Hitchcock would just cut.
