An appraisal of Hitchcock’s Rope, over sixty years since its first release, can reveal as much about the limitations of the director’s approach as it does about his technical innovations.

Hitchcock’s independence as a director in the US had been a long time coming. Moving to the States in 1939 to work for Selznick International Pictures, Hitchcock was, for the first time, able to achieve financial stability and work using professional studios much larger than those where he had learned his craft in Britain.

Despite insisting at the time that David Selznick was the only producer he would work for in the States and expecting him to be granted considerable artistic freedom, Hitchcock was in for a ‘rude shock’, finding himself locked into a situation where Selznick micro-managed proceedings to a considerable degree, notoriously starting the relationship by sending Hitchcock a 3,000 word memo outlining the problems he had with his reworking of the screenplay (Adair 2002).

Even in face of these constraints, this uncomfortable collaboration proved particularly fertile for Hitchcock, producing the Oscar winning Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946) amongst others. It is somewhat telling that upon liberating himself from the constraints of Selznick – following the interesting failure of The Paradine Case (1947) – Hitchcock used his long sought after independence, attained through the establishment of Transatlantic Pictures with friend Sidney Bernstein, to direct Rope, which arguably pitted him against greater constraints than he had been under with Selznick.

Rope, adapted from British author Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play of the same name, gives an account of 75 minutes in the life of two bourgeois young men living in New York who, influenced by their old schoolmaster’s bastardisation of Nietzsche’s theory of the supermen, murder a friend of theirs who they believe to be inferior – ‘taking up space’ – then immediately proceeding to hold a dinner party of his family and their old schoolmaster (played by James Stewart) where food is served upon a case that, unbeknownst to the guests, is acting as a makeshift coffin for their newly-murdered victim.

The constraints were threefold. As Hitchcock was filming for the first time in Technicolor, the film crew had to wield gigantic cameras which both set and actors had to accommodate. This was further exacerbated by the fact that Rope was to be performed in real time and, in order to maintain the suspense, Hitchcock insisted the film be shot in long takes that would often near the maximum possible (10 min) length for colour film cartridges at that time. This meant that – in order to accommodate the cameras – the entire set had to be mobile with walls, chairs and tables being continually moved during filming. A task made even harder by the fact that this was performed so quietly a direct sound-track could be filmed (Truffaut 1983).

Thirdly, facing restrictions imposed by organisation such as the legion of decency - and the limits of what the audience themselves would tolerate – Hitchcock faced the constraint of presenting the three major protagonists as homosexual without ever stating such explicitly (Bouzereau 2001).

At a press conference during the filming of Rope, Hitchcock announced that everything had been exceptionally well rehearsed. This reportedly prompted the comment from James Stewart that, ‘the only damn thing that’s been rehearsed is the cameras’ (Bouzereau 2001). Whilst this is certainly untrue – Hitchcock notoriously planned every scene before filming to such meticulous detail that he hardly needed to be on set, with Rope being no exception – Stewart’s annoyance regarding the camera is understandable.

As a Times review of the film at the time argued, the association of Hamilton and Hitchcock ‘would seem to promise much, for both know how to play on the nerves and keep them taut’ (Times 1948), discussion of Hitchcock’s experimentation with technique dominated reviews. Even at this early stage reviewers were focusing upon Hitchcock’s overcoming of the constraints of 10 minute film reels in maintaining the appearance of a single-take by, in half of the reel changes, focusing on the backs of the protagonists and then zooming out again upon changing the reel.

As Crowther reported in the New York Times, ‘The novelty of the picture is not in the drama itself, it being a plainly deliberate and rather thin exercise in suspense, but merely in the method which Mr. Hitchcock has used to stretch the intended tension for the length of the little stunt. And, with due regard for his daring (and for that of Transatlantic Films), one must bluntly observe that the method is neither effective nor does it appear that it could be’ (Crowther 1948).

Upon its re-release in 1983, after being seldom seen for over 20 years, discussion of Hitchcock’s technical experiment still dominated reviews, with Roger Ebert arguing – rightly – that this technique was an ‘unnecessary gimmick’ as the sense of temporal continuity can be maintained even if a director cuts between shots, My Dinner with Andre (1981) being a case in point (Ebert 1984).

The film was well received in some camps: Charles Tachella and Roger Therond in the left-wing French journal L’ecran français saw Rope as a point where Hitchcock was becoming ‘audaciously sure of his audacity’ (Boyd and Palmer 2006) and would be drawn upon by the soon to be established Cahiers du Cinema as evidence that Hitchcock was an unacknowledged auteur. However audiences were lukewarm to the film and – despite attempts to ban the film in certain areas of the States acting as a spur to see it – as Hitchcock scholar Leff puts it, ‘ultimately audiences wanted pictures, not experiments’ (Leff 1999).

Hitchcock would later describe his filming of Rope to François Truffaut as ‘a stunt… I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it.’ Whilst Truffaut is right to convince Hitchcock that the technical innovation is a ‘positive step in [his] evolution’, its description as an ‘indulgence’ is apt: Hitchcock’s obsession with the technical side of the production of Rope is to the detriment of what could have been very rich content (Truffaut 1983).

Whilst criticised for being ‘too straight to play the part’ of a schoolmaster who was supposed to have had relations with one of the murderers (Bouzereau 2001), Stewart is effective playing out-of-type as the philosophy teacher who is led to an epiphany - ‘tonight you’ve made me ashamed of every concept I ever had of superior or inferior beings’ - after being presented with the horrid reality of his students who claim to, ‘have lived what you and I have talked’.

However in the film itself the tragedy of Stewart’s situation and the intricacies of his relationship and influence upon the boys remain largely unexplored. To say that Stewart is miscast is to make him an unfair scapegoat for a script that sees him u-turn from espousing Nietzschean theories of superior beings being able to justly murder inferiors to an adoption of mainstream American values: ‘Now I know that each of us are a separate human… with the right to live and work and think as individuals, but with an obligation to the society that we live in’.

Little (2006) argues that, ‘this film made in the aftermath of the Second World War, had a specific aim in taking on not philosophy, but the perils associated with its uses. Hitler had used the rhetoric of a whole host of philosophers, but prominently Nietzsche, and Hitchcock was trying to make sense of this’.

Little is correct to point to the fact that in many ways an exploration of the motivations behind the drive towards rationalising murder through philosophies of superior beings was arguably more timely than after the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case, of two New York teenagers who murdered a 14 year-old inspired by Nietzschean ideas, that inspired Hamilton’s original play. However these themes, whilst present, appear in Rope more as frills than something that Hitchcock was seriously striving to make sense of.

Indeed, as scriptwriter, Arthur Laurents has argued, he was keen to include more depth to the two boys in Rope, make them appear as more rounded human beings rather than simply obsessed murderers. Laurents resigned himself to the fact that this was not the intention in Hitchcock’s Rope (Bouzereau 2001). And, as long as one doesn’t find oneself preoccupied with watching for the reel changes, Hitchcock does not fail to deliver the suspense expected of him and some excellent dark humour.

However whilst Hitchcock cannot be faulted for taking risks and utilising his long-sought after independence to innovate technically, one can only speculate at what could have been if Hitchcock had chosen to dedicate the time to rehearsing the ideas behind Rope as much as he had rehearsed the filming of it.

* Adair, Gene. Alfred Hitchcock: Filming Our Fears, Oxford University Press, 2002.
* Bouzereau, Laurent (dir) ‘Rope’ Unleashed (2001).
* Boyd, David, and Palmer, R. Barton. After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation and Intertextuality, University of Texas Press, 2006.
* Crowther, Bosley ‘Rope’: An Exercise in Suspense Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, The New York Times, 17 August 1948
* Ebert, Roger. Rope, Chicago Sun-Times, 15 June 1984.
* Leff, Leonard J. Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration, New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.
* Little, Ben. Impractical Pragmatics in Doing Philosophy at the Movies, Film-Philosophy, v. 10., n. 3, 2006. pp122-128.
* Truffaut, François.  Hitchcock, Simon and Schuster, 1983.