Two men murder their friend then hold a party, inviting the victim’s own family.
Driven by the hubris of a killer, Rope is in that sense a story as old as time, though how the thriller was made was much more experimental. The film is made up of several long takes of up to 10 minutes, designed to resemble one real time, long take (though it doesn’t unfold entirely in real time, unless you like your parties to break up after an hour).
Rope was not a hit on release, and Hitchcock was apparently always unhappy with what he had attempted to do; additionally, star James Stewart believed himself to have been miscast as Dr Rupert Cadell, the film’s crumbling moral backbone.
Old-style melodrama can, to modern audiences, feel overwrought, the passage of time making Rope‘s histrionics and painted New York window view even more anachronistic. Once you settle into the style and deliberation of how the actors speak it feels rather luxuriant, and anyway the film still holds its own as a study of morality and conceit, on both sides. Stewart’s Cadell is realistically baffled, for a long time not knowing (or not allowing himself to know) what is up but aware that something is, while the single set adds to the claustrophobia.
The cruel, snobbish Brandon and brittle, easily-overwhelmed Phillip strangle their schoolfriend David Ketley (Dick Hogan) in their own apartment, a murder well-planned and deliberately stagey itself, as David’s body is shoved into a carved wooden chest which sits at the side of the drawing room. Once the party guests arrive it’s a looming presence, the spectre at the feast, keeping its secrets, for now. Even unopened, it is affecting everyone there.
Cadell – the old prep school teacher of Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) – is no Hercule Poirot, whose initial bafflement at a case is eased by his, and our, conviction that he will, eventually, come to the truth. Which means we follow the twists, turns and dead ends in Rupert’s mind as he questions and needles, his guilt and horror when he realises that his own teachings have formed the basis for Brandon’s warped reasoning. But that is more than enough to start Phillip fracturing, the already terrified young man moving ever closer to the edge.
Rope comes in at a tight 80 minutes, and it’s an intense watch. Though like me you may well tumble down various internet rabbit holes afterwards, stretching into hours: the making of the film; Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play the film is based on; the real-life case on which the play itself was based; and chicken strangling (okay not that last one, though it would have been relevant).
Brandon and Phillip live in their plush apartment, looking out over the New York skyline, assisted by Mrs Wilson, their live-out housekeeper. The pair are clearly a couple, their lives entwined, though class differences also appear to play a part in their unequal relationship.
Their motive for murder is really Brandon’s motive, and turns out to have its origins in Dr Cadell’s prep school teachings on Nietzsche; twisted by Brandon to justify the murder of someone they deem inferior, by men who identify themselves as superior, and who are therefore not bound by traditional structures of morality.
It may seem contrived for a fictitious killer to arrange a party for the evening after the murder, which is what Brandon does. Though considering how real-life murderers often behave – staging their crimes, returning to the scene, goading and mocking – it is possibly the most realistic part of the whole charade. Many murderers consider themselves superior to the people looking for them, their taunts sometimes their undoing. Brandon invites David’s fiancée Janet (Joan Chandler), father Henry Kentley (Cedric Hardwicke), Janet’s ex-boyfriend Kenneth (Douglas Dick) and Rupert (James Stewart), but as the evening progresses, the guests become more worried for David, who should have joined them, while Rupert begins to smell a rat.
Stewart is both an ambivalent presence and all too human as a man who considers himself to live a moral life while instructing his equals in the same; a snob who realises his mistake far too late and then has to urgently extricate himself from its results. Joan Chandler’s delightful Janet is a perfect foil for Brandon: secure in her privileged position in society and with nothing to prove, she is classy and naturally witty, though diffident. Her diffidence highlights its lack in Brandon, which turns out to be his downfall.
Farley Granger as Phillip and James Stewart as Dr Rupert Cadell
As parties go, it’s stilted and awkward. No one is at ease, as Brandon, turned on by the heightened danger he has put himself and Phillip in, revels in heading off a denouement should anyone give signs of wanting to fiddle with David’s temporary resting place.
Brandon fancies himself a thrillingly clever marionettist, but he has also set in motion his own destruction. It’s obvious he wants Rupert’s approval and also admiration, but that requires Rupert to find out what Brandon and Phillip have done.(Dall is superb, keeping the audience on a knife-edge as the arrogance that drove Brandon to kill threatens to expose him in almost every conversation.) On a second watch, one of the first scenes, straight after the murder and before Cadell’s arrival – Brandon flinging wide the curtains then holding court to Phillip – shows just how much he models his speech patterns and mannerisms on his old teacher, and also that surface level imitation is all he can do.
The denouement, not just Cadell discovering the truth but his horror at his part in it, leaves Brandon floundering, not because he has been found out but because Cadell is not impressed. Like many very privileged people he has never needed to grow up, to understand people as more than what they can do for him; at the end of the film he has lost, and lost to the very morality he so despises.
Meanwhile the mentally collapsing Phillip retreats to the grand piano, and the musical talent that should have been both the making of him and an escape route from Brandon.
Brandon’s party is enthralling but also horridly tense. The guests, Phillip and Brandon chat off camera about where David might be, while we follow Mrs Wilson finally getting to do what she wants to do: which is bustle back and forth clearing off everything sitting on top of the chest, open it up and put stacks of old books back in it.
Between the deliberately stilted conversations, Rope bubbles with natural black humour. Naturally, “Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself” hangs over the killers from the first frame. Meanwhile the oblivious and cheerily offbeat Mrs Atwater, David’s aunt (a wonderful Constance Collier), almost pushes Phillip to the edge when she reads his palm and tells him he’ll become famous for doing something with his hands.
My favourite scene though has she and Janet stand over the chest with Rupert stuck in the middle as the two women list their favourite actors – Cary Grant, James Mason, Errol Flynn – and of course their star signs. But no James Stewart. Maybe they just don’t like a Taurus.
Do Brandon and Phillip get their comeuppance? And what of Rupert? Read my article: The end of the Rope
Watch the trailer for Rope now: