WALLA Spring, 2015 Hitchcock in the Forties Marshall Deutelbaum, Coordinator and Presenter

Rope (Transatlantic Pictures / Warner Bros., 1948) 81 min.

James Stewart (Rupert Cadell); John Dall (Brandon Shaw); Farley Granger (Phillip Morgan); Dick Hogan (David Kentley); Sir Cedric Hardwicke (Mr. Henry Kentley); Constance Collier (Mrs. Anita Atwater); Douglas Dick (Kenneth Lawrence); Joan Chandler (Janet Walker).

Hitchcock’s Rope, based on Patrick Hamilton’s play of 1929, “Rope’s End,” was the first production of the company formed by Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein. Initially adapted by Hume Cronin, Arthur Laurents wrote the final script, Americanizing the English play which was thought to have been based most likely on the kidnapping and thrill murder in Chicago some five years earlier of 14 year old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb. Rather than simply a thrill killing, Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan murder David Kentley at the beginning of the film as an intellectual exercise in Nietzschean philosophy as taught to them by Rupert Cadell. To satisfy the censorial demands of the Production Code, the homosexual relationship between Brandon and Phillip is never explicitly mentioned, though it remains a subtext in the drama.

Rope is Hitchcock’s most experimental film. Restricted after the opening shot to a single set, it mostly consists of unedited long takes lasting as long as ten minutes. To create the illusion that the film is unedited, Hitchcock hid the few moments where one long take is edited to the next by moving the camera into a close-up of a man’s dark jacket or some other object in order to black out the screen momentarily during the change of shot. Despite its single set and minimal editing, Rope is not static. A four-man crew moved the bulky Technicolor camera weighing more than 200 pounds through 25-30 different positions during each take to follow the actors’ movements. In addition to having to speak their lines perfectly lest they ruin a long take and have to begin the take again, the actors also had to step over cables on the floor and avoid furniture being moved as the camera tracked them around the set. Like the furniture, the interior walls of the sets were moveable to allow the camera to pass through their openings. Strikingly, though, the camera remains fixed in one spot during a lengthy dramatic moment late in the film.

The New York skyline visible through the window was a moving diorama three times the size of the set, with spun-glass clouds that changed position nine times and 6,000 tiny lights that came on as day turned into night. For each reel, 25-30 numbered stickers on the floor indicated the sequence of camera positions which were pointed out to the camera crew by a “continuity supervisor.”

Rope is also Hitchcock’s first color film. In keeping with Technicolor’s recommendations, the film’s color palette is muted. However, the set is flooded with alternating flashes of red and green neon, to visually accentuate the film’s dramatic conclusion. Hitchcock’s “appearance” in the film also depends on color. It takes the form of his signature silhouette as a blinking red shape above the word, “Reduco,” the fictitious weight loss product used in his Lifeboat (1944) cameo. The blinking signage is visible through the window to the left of Janet’s face when she says good night to Brandon at the end of the party.