Rope's Certain Morality

Alfred Hitchcock at his very best

[Dear Substack Reader, over on Facebook, a few of us have had a blast comparing our favorite movies. I think we were excluding comedies (intentionally or not, I’m not sure), and I listed Hitchcock and Nolan as my two favorite directors with Ford a close second. Here’s a piece I published four years ago in the Epoch Times. I hope you enjoy! Yours, Brad]

Rope begins deceptively, with fine lilting music and scenes of an idyllic New York City block. A woman walks her baby in a stroller, a car glides down the one-way street, a policeman escorts two boys through the light traffic. Despite the omnipresent brick, glass, and concrete, the view, bizarrely, is almost pastoral. Then, as the credits finish, a fierce scream is heard, but all too briefly. The scene changes, and two young men in a plush Manhattan apartment are strangling a third.

“Strangulation has more vivid pictorial qualities,” the director, Alfred Hitchcock, explained in macabre detail. “It is considerably more horrifying to watch a man struggle and strain under the agonizing pressure of an effective throttling, than to see one slump and flow with bullets in his midriff or a shiv between his ribs.”

The task completed, the two stuff the body of the third into a chest. Exhausted and exhilarated, one of them sighs deeply and lights a cigarette, while the other stares in stunned bewilderment and confusion. Not only have they just murdered their close friend, David Kentley, but they have also invited his family, his fiancé, his closest friend, and their old House Master at prep school to a dinner party to be held almost immediately after the murder. They even serve dinner from the top of the chest as the body lies within.

“Good Americans usually die young on the battlefield, don’t they?” the smug one asks, rhetorically. “The Davids of this world merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect murder. Of course, he was a Harvard undergraduate. That might make it justifiable homicide,” he jokes.

The rest of the story, based on a play by Patrick Hamilton, “Rope’s End”—itself based on a true-to-life murder from 1929—follows the several participants of the dinner party in real time. That is, the action of the movie takes place entirely within a continuous 85 minutes in the evening. Director Alfred Hitchcock admits the whole idea was a bit of experiment, as each scene in the movie—with not a single break outside of the opening two shot—happens in 10-11 minute segments, exactly the time possible per canister of film.

I undertook Rope as a stunt; that’s the only way I can describe it. I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it. The stage drama was played out in the actual time of the story; the action is continuous from the moment the curate in goes up until it comes down again. I asked myself wether it was technically possible to film it in the same way. The only way to achieve that, I found, would be to handle the shooting in the same continuous action, with no break in the telling of the story that begins at seven-thirty and ends at nine-fifteen. And I got this crazy idea to do it in a single shot.

Almost as important, Rope is Hitchcock’s first color movie. Color was no mere gimmick for the great director, but rather a necessity to highlight the dramatic qualities of the murder and the story falling into twilight and, ultimately, the dark night. “I wouldn’t make a Technicolor picture just for the sake of using color,” Hitchcock admitted. “I’ve waited 17 years to find a story of my type in which color actually plays a dramatic role.” The employment of color was, Hitchcock said, all about mood. “We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there’s no such thing as color; in fact, there’s no such thing as a face, because until the light hits it, it is non-existent,” Hitchcock believed. There is no such thing as a line; there’s only the light and the shade.”

Hitchcock had not only directed the movie, but he had also—through his new but short-lived company, Transatlantic Pictures—produced it as well. Sadly, though, Rope failed to show well at the box office, and the reviews of it at the time were mixed. “At all events, the picture takes on a dull tone as it goes and finally ends in a fizzle which is forecast almost from the start,” lamented the New York Times in 1948. Less prestigious papers, such as the Syracuse Post Standard claimed Rope held “some of the best acting, directing and photography in Technicolor that has recently slipped across the local screen,” and the Abilene Reporter News proclaimed “the expert use of Technicolor and Hitchcock’s wizardry at building a plot to explosive excitement make Rope one of the screen’s most sensational films.”

Looking back over the history of movie making, it’s extremely difficult for any cinephile to understand the New York Times’s dismissal of the film. Not only is Rope a great Alfred Hitchcock movie, but it has to be one of the greatest movies in cinematic history. The directing is compelling, the acting is extraordinary, the dialogue is crisp, and the unraveling of the arrogance of the murderers is downright gripping.

In hindsight, it’s also impossible not to be struck by how objectively moral the story is. As teenagers, the two murderers had spent many late-night hours discussing ethics and morality with their House Master, Rupert Cadell (Jimmy Stewart). He, being a follower of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), had taught them that morality and ethics existed only to keep the masses in check. The elite—or the supermen—were not only above and beyond good and evil, but they had the privilege of acting as such, not just believing as such. After all, the victims are “inferior beings whose lives are unimportant anyway.” And, who, then, are the elite. “The few are those men of such intellectual and cultural superiority that they’re above the traditional moral concepts. Good and evil, right and wrong are invented for the ordinary, average man, the inferior man because he needs them.”

When Cadell figures out what his two former students have done, the reality of his teaching and philosophy become unbearable to him.

Justice, it seems, is absolute. So is the greatness of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope.