Swinging From Hitchcock's Rope

The following contains spoilers for Alfred Hitchcock's Rope

Since she knew I’d only seen a couple of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, my girlfriend gave me a DVD box set for Christmas. It’s a handsome set. A pool-table red felt stylishly lines the outside, Hitchcock’s signature profile embroidered in it. A full 14 of his movies reside within. The first one we put on was Rope.

Rope was released in 1948 and stars Jimmy Stewart. Based on the play of the same name the basic plot involves two friends strangling a former classmate to death, stashing the body in a chest, and hosting a dinner party with the corpse’s unsuspecting parents and fiancé in attendance.

The Wikipedia entry on the film refers to the killers, Brandon and Phillip, as Aesthetes, which I first read as Assletes. Apparently this refers to a 19th century European movement that emphasizes a complete disconnect between art and morality. For Brandon and Phillip killing David Kentley is akin to high art, proving their intellectual superiority. I think Brandon is the bigger asslete, though. Through-out the dinner party Phillip is coming apart inside from the guilt, but Brandon keeps trying to add little flourishes to the murder. He moves all of the table settings from the actual dinner table to the chest so that everyone will eat over the body. He lets David’s father borrow some books and binds them for him with the same rope he used to kill his son. He even swings a conversation into “Isn’t murder kind of cool? Hey, man, I’m just sayin’” territory.

Jimmy Stewart plays a past professor of the three young men (2 killers, 1 killed). The idea for Brandon and Phillip’s grand murderpiece came from his hypothetical classroom discussions. In that way it’s kind of like Inception. By the end you get the impression that Jimmy Stewart will be dealing with the guilt for a long while.

Rope is known for its experimental approach to filmmaking. The story unfolds in real time and consists of about ten long shots strung together to give the impression that the entire film is one long scene. I think the idea is to give a subconscious impression to the audience. The movie is a metaphorical rope.

After the end credits rolled we found the official trailer on the disk.



What is really fascinating about it is how it touches on things that aren’t in the movie, things that occur before and after. In a kind of prologue to the film it shows the audience two lovers on a park bench and, late for an appointment, the man walks away. Then Jimmy Stewart, looking out into the camera, cuts in and says, “That’s the last time you’ll see him alive”. This is true. The life has already been squeezed out of David by the first moment he’s shown in the actual movie.

Stewart than describes events in the past tense, “What happened to David Kentley changed my life completely…and the lives of seven others”. So it’s kind of like an epilogue, too. The events of the film have already happened, and he’s talking from the other side of that. I guess you could infer that David Kentley‘s murder was turned into a motion picture, thereby becoming a more traditional form of artistic expression. And the Professor's doing some advertising for it, hopefully because he finds it therapeutic...