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Rope
Retrospectives
- May 2003
USA, 1948. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Written
by Hume Cronyn, Arthur Laurents; based on the play "Rope's End" by Patrick
Hamilton. Photographed by William V. Skall, Joseph A. Valentine. Edited by
William H. Ziegler. Music by David Buttolph. Released by Warner Bros. 80
minutes.
Starring John Dall, Farley Granger, James Stewart,
Cedric Hardwicke, Constance Collier, Douglas Dick, Edith Evanson, Dick Hogan,
Joan Chandler.
There's a movie out now called "Russian Ark",
which gets an instant place in cinema history for being the first ever feature
film consisting of one unbroken take. Directed by Alexander Sokurov, the
film is a point of view shot drifting around St. Petersburg's Hermitage for
an hour and a half, as people from a whole lot of different times and cultures
drift in and out at random. A total of two thousand extras appear -- swanning
around, checking out the paintings, performing elaborate dance routines.
It's an amazingly audacious piece of choreography. Bloody boring,
too.
In response to the praise being heaped upon "Russian
Ark", I think it is time to revisit Alfred Hitchcock's
"Rope", the former heavyweight champ of unbroken shot stunts.
Sokurov was able to do a whole film in a single take because he shot on digital
video. Hitchcock did not have the luxury -- with only about ten minutes of
footage being able to be got on a reel of film, the master was required to
plan out his shots with cuts in mind, and figure out ways to make them
invisible.
The movie is based on a play by Patrick Hamilton,
inspired by the Leopold-Loeb case, and it follows two guys, in one apartment,
on one night, as they throw a party while one of their friends lies dead
in the living room desk. They murdered him "for the sake of danger and the
sake of killing", to feel alive, and because they've read too much Nietzsche
and believe that they're cultural and intellectual supermen with the right
to kill those inferior creatures that merely take up space. As the story
moves on and the party gets into full swing, the guests wonder where the
missing person is, and the killers are occupied with wondering whether their
old philosophy professor (James Stewart) will guess what they've been up
to.
In terms of convincing us that there's only one
shot, "Rope" fails. The connections between takes are pretty obvious; the
camera tends to go into random close-ups of people's backs, and then move
out again as the next take begins. And I suppose you could call the over-the-top
acting a flaw -- John Dall, as the main conspirator, goes a bit too far with
his constant smug grin, and Farley Granger, who plays the timid associate,
goes way in the other direction, carrying such a nervous glare and quivering
voice that we can hardly believe the intelligent lines coming out of his
mouth.
But I don't care about that. The filmmaking stunt
is an issue for film historians and viewers with eagle eyes, and Hitchcock
never cared much about wooden performances, as long as his stories and filmmaking
techniques communicated the depths of his characters. If you want to pick
at the movie further, you might say that although the writers claimed they
implied a homosexual relationship between the two main guys, it doesn't come
across very well or seem particularly relevant. And it's hard to believe
that the Stewart character, so logical and well-mannered, would have ever
put much passion into the theories of superior beings that inspired the boys
to commit their crime.
What is often unfairly said about "Rope" is that
it was a gimmick -- interesting for its attempt to do something nobody had
done before, not very good at holding the attention. But the continuous movement
of the camera is not a gimmick. Hitchcock felt in retrospect that it came
across too stagy, but I think that the film moves just right, its method
thoroughly cinematic in concept, and the theatrical quality of the result
being perfect for the story. The movie should feel like an unnervingly drawn-out
one-room piece, what with the unseen focus of attention being stuck in one
place, and the dramatic tension based on whether the evening's smooth rhythm
will be interrupted by discovery.
There's some terrific dialogue in the piece ("Out
of character for David to drink anything as corrupt as whisky!" "Out of character
for him to be murdered, too."), and some silly lines that wink around the
central issue of the plot ("I hope you knock 'em dead!", etc., etc.). Hitchcock
has some more fun in a scene where one of the silly old women at the party
wonders about a movie starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Berman, called, "Something
something… or just plain 'something'…" She's talking about "Notorious",
the movie Hitch made two years before this one. And without a role for himself
in the action, Hitchcock managed to sneak his trademark cameo into the film
by appearing on a neon sign outside of the apartment window.
Those are side notes, and the main point is, the
film does work. It's nice to see that, as I write this, "Rope" has a 100%
rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Snobs may try to make out that online critics
have less knowledge about film history than print writers and academics,
but look to see who has more common sense, and our words speak for themselves.
Even if this would be called one of Hitchcock's lesser works, it's still
a minor masterpiece, and a testament to what a great filmmaker he really
was -- he could turn out brilliance even when he considered himself to be
simply playing around. I can watch "Rope" time and again, while "Russian
Ark" will have to wait for my reincarnation.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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