leeper@ahutb.UUCP (leeper) (03/18/85)
ROPE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
One of the traditions of the live stage is the murder play: DIAL M FOR
MURDER, THE MOUSETRAP, SLEUTH, DEATHTRAP, and a host of others. The main
advantage that a murder play has over a murder story on film is its
immediacy. Because it is a play, it is limited to three or four intervals
of time, each covered by a scene. The audience shares a room with the
characters, and with a very limited set of scenes sees the crime and the
solution. The audience knows when the final scene starts, that in the next
few moments in these characters' lives in this room the crime will be
solved. A film, which can jump forward in time, backward in time, and from
any location in the world to any other just does not capture its audience in
the same way. Hitchcock apparently recognized this ironic limitation of
film and attempted to overcome it in ROPE (1948).
ROPE is a single-act play, 80 minutes long, covering 80 minutes in one
room. In that 80 minutes, there is a murder, a party, and the aftermath of
the party when the murder is solved--perhaps a record for fast crime
solution. Two college students, Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Philip (Farley
Granger), murder a friend, David, just for the sake of proving that they can
get away with it. The characters and the crime are presumably based on the
very similar real case of Leopold and Loeb. (That crime was also the
subject of the film COMPULSION.)
Top billing (but only third place in screen time) went to James
Stewart. Stewart plays a college professor with a laconic view of murder.
(Later when Hitchcock appeared weekly on TV, and edited books of mystery
stories, he affected the same attitude.) The boys base their ideas on
Stewart's philosophy, taking his callousness toward killing seriously.
The real problem with ROPE is that the story is not up to the the
film's production values. In fact, the killers are unrealistically
incompetent. Philip, who is coerced by Brandon into a part in the murder,
proceeds in the most obvious guilty manner possible. At the mention of the
victim's name, he breaks glasses in his hand or babbles about how he is
playing cat-and-mouse games. His whole manner screams "I am guilty of
something and I am terrified I might get caught." Brandon is a little
cooler, but in not very subtle ways he keeps leaving clues around for the
sport of it. And in case anyone misses the clues, Philip can be counted on
to stare at them and go white. Rather than coming off as the super-thinkers
that Brandon has labeled them, they come off as just two bumbling killers.
Hitchcock works hard to maintain a sense that the film was a single
shot, but the reel changes are still obvious. The camera for no reason pans
to a characters back or some other single-colored part of the scene to cover
the changing of the film reel. It is a technique that does not quite fool
the viewer, and the changes are even more obvious when the tone of the
actors' voices change suddenly.
ROPE was Hitchcock's first Technicolor film and his first with James
Stewart, and as such, it was a taste of what he was later to do. Like most
films for the rest of Hitchcock's career, it is glossy but on close scrutiny
flawed in unexpected ways. Still, after years of being tied up legally, it
is worth watching to get a virtually new taste of Hitchcock's style.
Mark R. Leeper
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