Enough rope to hang themselves
Rope is a bit of an odd duck in the Alfred Hitchcock canon, both transitional and anomalous. It’s his first color film, but more importantly, it’s his only real foray into the single-take illusion, a gimmick to which the film is tightly bound (pun intended). Unlike the sleek inside-out design of Rear Window or the 3D of Dial M for Murder, Rope feels less like an inevitable masterstroke that happens to have a high concept and more like a bold stunt: an experiment that half-works, half-wobbles. As much as it’s a one-off, it’s a series of important firsts: the first fruit of Hitchcock’s independence from producer David O. Selznick; and only his second project as his own producer after Notorious. It’s a dipped toe in Technicolor that Hitchcock would use masterfully in Vertigo among others. And it’s the director’s first of pairing with Jimmy Stewart. But what it is still unmistakably a Hitchcock film, packed with suspense, guilty psychology, and a perverse crime carried out for the leads to grapple with.
Rope opens with a bang; or, rather, a scream: Two privileged young men, Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger), strangle their former classmate David Kentley (Dick Hogan) in the opening moments of the film. They do it not out of revenge or desperation but for the sheer, sick thrill of it — a smug exercise in Nietzschean superiority, a “perfect murder” to prove they can. (The story is inspired by the real-life Leopold and Loeb murder case in which two young men killed a fourteen year old in an elaborate plot with similar motivation — to prove they could get away with it through their sheer intellect.)
The pair stash David’s body inside a chest in their penthouse apartment, then promptly host a dinner party for David’s friends and family, serving food and small talk atop the hidden corpse. It’s an act of baroque cruelty masquerading as a high-minded intellectual exercise.
The guest list at this soiree-slash-secret funeral is a reflection of the various aspects of metropolitan young adulthood. There’s David’s father (Cedric Hardwicke) and dotty aunt (Constance Collier) as a look at the role of the older generation shaping the new one. David’s fiancée Janet (Joan Chandler) and her ex-flame Kenneth (Douglas Dick) serve as lenses into the role of money in shaping relationships and young love. There’s also the housekeeper Mrs. Wilson (Edith Evanson), bustling around, a constant reminder of Brandon and Phillip’s lack of self-sufficiency despite their claims of superiority. (She’s also a constant threat to discover the body in the chest.) Most importantly, there’s Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), the former prep school housemaster for the students who initially espoused the kind of amoral intellectual bravado that Brandon and Phillip have twisted into bloodshed. Brandon practically salivates at Rupert’s approval; Phillip, already cracking under the strain, can barely look him in the eye.
Tension simmers at first, then boils, as cocktails flow and Brandon and Phillip come closer to letting their lie slip. The camera — bound by the film’s long-take conceit — keeps circling the chest, ensuring that even as the conversation between characters bounces around, the audience never forgets the dark heart of the gathering. The film’s most agonizing sequence comes not during an accusation or confession, but the slow, banal cleaning of the chest. Mrs. Wilson, dutiful as ever, begins tidying up the buffet atop the chest, serving almost as an altar, removing one object after another until she’s about to open it and and discover the telltale corpse. For an unbearable stretch, the film traps us between rooting for discovery and fearing it as Mrs. Wilson makes one trip to the kitchen after another. It’s an outright masterful moment of suspense, even by Hitchcock’s standards.
It gradually becomes clear that the wedge into solving the mystery is Stewart’s Rupert: He slowly recognizes Brandon and Phillip’s behavior as strained and bizarre, the glint in their eyes a little too fiery. He applies his own detective skills, and he starts to see a vision of his own worst impulses come to life. Confronting it forces Rupert to see the grotesque real-world consequences of the dangerous ideas he treats as a parlor game.
The common reading of Brandon and Phillip as a closeted couple is hardly subtle even by 1940s standards. In adapting Patrick Hamilton’s stage play, Hitchcock and screenwriter Arthur Laurents, himself gay, laced the film with indicators — easy intimacy between the pair, shared living space, intertwined psyches, motifs of dominance and submission. The Hays Code prevented any explicit acknowledgment, and it may work better as an unspoken pull anyways. But it glows just under the surface and aligns with Hitchcock’s tradition of linking queerness with violent impulses.
Seen through that lens, the body in the chest isn’t just a narrative device; it’s a rotting symbol of guilt, self-loathing, and the invisible but always-present burden of living a life unaccepted by the world. It’s the monstrous secret that Brandon and Phillip have both metaphorically and literally trapped inside their apartment, the thing they alternately flaunt and dread discovery of. Rope’s tension is therefore amplified: Will they get caught for the crime, and will the world see them for what they truly are? The implications extend beyond the pair’s sexuality alone, touching anyone whose identity or ambitions don’t cleanly fit the mold of postwar Manhattan’s polite society.
Brandon and Phillip embody two radically different ways of coping with that dissonance. Brandon, all preening confidence and brittle cruelty, is comfortable flaunting the rules he believes himself above. He’s not just proud of their crime; he practically wants to be caught, if only to bask in the affirmation of his own superiority for executing such a “perfect crime.” Phillip, meanwhile, sweats and crumbles, his nerves raw from the moment the film starts. His guilt is almost unbearable to witness. Together, they form a duality of of anxiety and arrogance, each feeding the other toward their collapse in the closing minutes.
Whatever Rope’s flaws, its core strength as a small-scale suspense film is undeniable. The pace, despite the long-take formalism, is well-shaped for the most part — any runtime longer than its 80 minutes would strain. Hitchcock teases out tension with microscopic precision: first intrigue at the very concept of a party celebrating a death without the guests knowing, the evidence right under their noses. The tension builds incrementally: half-glances, quavers in the voice, blips of tension. Hitchcock uses the camera not merely as a recording device but as a participant in the drama, aligning our gaze with the traps he’s laid out so we can track the building pressure.
It helps that Dall and Granger deliver wonderful performances tailor-made for Hitchcock’s needs, distinct but compatible. Brandon as rendered by Dall is an anti-hero worth savoring, his urbane haughtiness both charismatic and snakelike — it belongs in the Hitchcock Hall of Fame. Granger, for his part, gives a raw-nerve turn that’s almost too on edge. His Phillip is a man reverberating with guilt to the point you wonder why he’d participate in the crime in the first place. He’s the negative image and complement to Brandon’s arrogance. It’s easy to see why Hitchcock would recast Granger as the morally compromised lead of Strangers on a Train a few years later.
If Dall and Granger feel close to ideal for their parts, Stewart is a rockier fit. In later Hitchcock collaborations like Vertigo and Rear Window, Hitchcock would mine the tension between Stewart’s genial everyman persona and his character’s buried darkness to wondrous, all-time great effect. Here, though, that same dissonance is a little too pronounced, and a little undercooked. Rupert needs an aura of menace and moral slipperiness for his complicity and genuine belief in Brandon and Phillip’s ideas about justified murder to feel credible, but Stewart’s aw-shucks affability blunts the impact and makes it seem like a joke. It’s not a ruinous casting choice, but it’s easy to imagine someone like Vincent Price, with his natural intensity and ability to carry both charm and threat in every syllable, giving Rupert the dangerous sparkle and depth the role in the script demands but Stewart seems baffled by.
The rest of the ensemble is pleasant but mostly unremarkable. Chandler makes an adorable romantic interest; I would have loved to have seen her in another Hitchcock film, but her acting credits are slim. Only Collier as David’s aunt threatens to tip the tone out of whack, leaning heavily into stagey transatlantic affectations that grow grating as the party drags on. Still, the supporting performances are just textured enough to keep the film flowing and interesting.
What Rope can’t fully escape is its stage-bound roots. For all the technical wizardry on display — moving walls, rolling props, a relentless camera dolly — there are stretches where the film feels like exactly what it is: a play adapted without enough cinematic reimagination. The linear time constraint means that characters occasionally drift into filler dialogue: tedious philosophical exchanges or laughless quips about 1940s uppercrust life. The script occasionally plods as it marks time until the next spike in tension. This is, of course, part of the point, but it’s still not very fun to watch.
This ties into another problem that weighs Rope down: the very gimmick that gives the film its identity. Hitchcock, a master manipulator of cinematic time and space through editing, finds himself hemmed in by the long-take structure. The best Hitchcock sequences can give the sensation of time expanding or contracting as the suspense requires through the pulse of cutting and shot construction. Here, he his outstanding craft works despite the restrictions, not because of them. The technique forces an almost theatrical rigidity on the timing of reveals and reversals, trading some of the director’s usual surgical precision for the steady glue to a single, flowing eye.
And about that oft-repeated “single-shot” descriptor: Rope was not truly shot in a single take. Rather, it’s a series of long takes cleverly stitched together, often by hiding a cut in the back of a character passing in front of the lens or a piece of furniture. There are even a couple obvious no-trick cuts. Hitchcock masks most of the transitions as well as he could given the reel-change limitations of 1940s cameras, but it’s always obvious. The illusion of real time mostly holds, but it cheats more than the film’s technical mythos might suggest.
Still, Rope remains solidly excellent for its 80-minute runtime, even approaching greatness at its best moments. Even with a premise that borders on intellectual exercise and self-imposed defeat, the suspense is thick. The well-acted moral queasiness baked into its premise gives the film more gravity and heft than than the technical stunt does. For all the bumpy patches along the way, Hitchcock’s capacity to stage and sustain tension is on full display.
After it left theaters in 1948, Rope went largely unseen for years. Hitchcock pulled it, along with a handful of his other films, from circulation in the 1950s, and it wouldn’t properly reemerge until the 1980s. Critics offered mixed takes once it reappeared, and it remains one of Hitch’s more divisive entries. Even Hitchcock himself seemed to waffle over time about the finished product — sometimes celebrating it as daring, sometimes dismissing it as an overwrought indulgence. The truth lies in the middle.
If Rope doesn’t quite reach the historic peaks of Hitchcock’s imperial phase — arguably already in play by 1948 with Notorious two years earlier — it remains a fascinating curiosity. It’s a film about masks slipping and nooses tightening, about a world where the walls between proper appearance and cruel reality are one thread away from unraveling. And even when Hitchcock is straining against his self-imposed limits, there’s something thrilling about watching him try.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.