Rope

Based on a play from 1929, Alfred Hitchcock directed his adaptation of Rope in 1948 and is one of his top films that I have seen the least. I've always found that the man's collection gets better with each viewing as subtle details and clever uses of direction become more apparent but having not seen this in years, it also felt like I was watching this for the first time. When people think of Hitchcock's classics, this might come at the end of the list or is sometimes even forgotten but does this deserve to sit in the shadow of the likes of Psycho?

True to the play it's based on, Rope is set in a single location during a dinner party at a Manhattan apartment, where two upper-class post-grads commit what they believe is the perfect murder and hide the body in plane sight just before the party begins. Brandon feels a great sense of accomplishment whereas Phillip is burdened with regret. It's a chilling, macabre premise for a Hitchcock film that didn't go down too well with audiences at the time and is unlike anything else he has ever made for all of the right reasons. In his other films, humour is often used to offset the darker aspects but with Rope there's something so claustrophobic in its direction which had me gripped.

Now an overused gimmick, back then the use of long takes was a rarity in films like this and Hitchcock insisted this technique was not an empty addition to the story, which I think gives Rope that suffocating sense of intensity. The performances from the two leads, John Dall and Farley Granger, are both terrific and while James Stewart thought of himself miscast as the boys former prep-school headmaster, he really comes to life in the final act. With a strong likeness to Ben Affleck, Dall wins the film and deserves a place among Hitchcock's best villains. It's such a shame his life was cut short at the age of 50, and that he never worked with Hitchcock again unlike the other two stars.

Rope is a masterclass in directing and acting but I can't deny there is an unevenness somewhere in the overall experience which does see it fail to reach the heights of Hitchcock's other films. Roger Ebert put it down as "an experiment that didn't work out" which I feel is too harsh for something as ambitious as this. Psycho is seen as Hitchcock's best horror but the way he depicts two men murder another in the pursuit of an elitist theory is no less horrific, making Rope a thriller which should not be missed for anyone interested.