A Rope, a Trunk and a Makeshift Dinner Table: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope”

Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’, remains one of his greatest cinematic achievements that turned away from traditional rules and paved a new path for future filmmakers. Rope is an astonishing venture of visual arrangement – a critical piece of art that exhibited Hitchcock’s careful pursuit for the genuine. Released in 1948, the film was the director’s first one in colour and also the first to star a recurring collaborator, James Stewart. It stood out to me for a few notable reasons – a one take, real time illusion and the premise of a “perfect murder” – a Hitchcockian concept that is quite enthralling yet comical.

The film begins with a scream that carries us to a baroque apartment in Manhattan, where the source is revealed to be a man named David Kentley who is being strangled to death by his two friends Brandon and Phillip. After the murder is committed, Brandon and Phillip stuff the body into a trunk and carry on in preparation for a dinner party that they are hosting the same night. Brandon has the lurid idea of serving supper on the trunk for the company, all of whom are relatives and friends of David – including his parents and fiancé. Rupert Cadell, played by James Stewart, who was the housemaster of the three men in prep school, is also a guest.

Brandon is shown to be the instigator to this murder, although it was Philip who carried out the actual strangulation. As the film goes on, Phillip becomes hysterical and paranoid which can be seen in contrast to Brandon’s collected yet careless behaviour. The pair is under the impression that their intellectual and social superiority will help them get away with what they think of as the perfect crime. As the sun sets over the city, the dinner guests discuss the victim and question his absence whilst his burial chest is always visible in the foreground. As the plot progresses in this single setting murder thriller, the killer’s university tutor begins to pick up on clues from an agitated Philip and a carelessly arrogant Brandon.

Rope is adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play of the same name, which itself was based on the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were upper-class Chicago law students who went on a crime spree that peaked in the murder of a fourteen year old boy. Like Brandon and Philip, the real-life murderers considered themselves Nietzschean supermen whose superiority of intellect exempted them from laws that govern the rest of us. Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy that “transcendent individuals, possessing extraordinary and unusual capabilities, hold superior intellect that allows them to rise above the laws and rules that bound the unimportant, average populace” was the driving force behind the murder. Brandon and Philip, by their interpretation of Nietzsche, felt they were not bound by any of society’s rules. “A superman is exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.” The two men learned this theory from Rupert but turned it into the horrid practice of killing a man, and getting away with it, just to feed one’s own intellectual pride.

The filming of Rope is really fascinating, even for a single location dinner party thriller. Inspired by the Aristotles Poetics on Unity in drama where it is required to have a single action represented as occurring in a single place and within the course of a day, Hitchcock seized the opportunity to shoot Rope in real time. And since the film was based on a play, the experiment was successfully executed as appearing to be a one shot film with a single continuous take. Hitchcock played with the dynamic connection between space, time and action by replacing set cinematographic norms with a new approach of longer takes.

Films were usually made up of at least hundreds of shots, where each would last around 10 seconds. Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ (1963) comprised of 1,360 shots whereas Rope just had 10. Each scene consisted for a full length of a film reel which was 10 minutes and the unavoidable cuts needed for changing the reel was thwarted by closing in on blank surfaces, where the next roll would begin with the same frame and therefore creating a mirage of continuity. This required the set to be completely mobile (even the fake clouds moved outside the window), so the walls in the apartment set were on wheels.

To assist in this, cameras were placed on dollies and complex movements took place silently, as the soundtrack was recorded directly. Equipment was placed on lubricated surfaces, to minimise noise. The idea of live recorded dialogue was a difficult feat in early cinema, yet Hitchcock carried it out with ease. This film experiment replicates the theatrical experience as it feels “live”. This creates a feeling of unpredictability that at any minute one of the actors could  mess up their lines, or even open the trunk.

The film in a sense makes the audience feel claustrophobic, as the camera follows the actors around every inch of the confined yet mobile set. The murderous pair is trapped as their crime is destined to be revealed, David’s corpse is trapped in its temporary resting place and we, the audience, is trapped in sufferable guilt of having the knowledge of what lies in the trunk while the dinner guests are left in the dark.