Rope
by Alfred Hitchcock
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: James StewartDirector: Alfred Hitchcock
Brand: NBC Universal
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 80 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-20
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Movie Reviews of Rope
Movie Review: Can ideas kill?
Summary: 5 Stars
Alfred Hitchcock's first color movie, "Rope," explores a rare but disturbing motivation for murder: mere thought. As history - twentieth century history in particular - demonstrates, monstrous acts sometimes originate from ideas. A mere synaptic spark within the wrong psychological framework may translate into a skull fractured by a bullet, a deep wound occupied by a knife, or a genocidal extermination by a governing body. Human neural pathways, as varied as snowflakes, manifest these dangerous ideas in innumerable ways. Most fizzle within the guilty brains that formed them, impotent as wet matchbooks. Others, unfortunately, manage to find a conduit into the eye-for-an-eye realm of action. In such cases, concepts seem to murder. Imagination becomes brutal reality. "Rope" examines, via its morally diverse cast, both sides of this thorny fence.
A thriller in reverse, the movie begins with a murder. Following the opening street scene, across which Hitchcock struts, the camera hones in on a curtain-clad window. Then a scream. Inside, David Kently's body goes limp. Brandown Shaw and Phillip Morgan check for signs of life before uncoiling the thick rope around David's neck. After a brief period of shock Brandon resounds with pride, as if he had just reached the summit of Everest or bagged his dream job. Phillip remains distant, querulous, and shaky. Placing the murder minutes after the opening titles compels the viewer to focus on motivation. The act of killing gets de-emphasized. Something subtler tugs at this narrative thread.
More shocking than the strangulation is the party Brandon has planned. People will arrive at the scene of the crime, a beautiful apartment that breathtakingly overlooks downtown New York, soon. Brandon begins to rhapsodize about superiority. Weeding out of the weak, the responsibility of superior beings, etc. He rattles off a litany of social Darwinism derived from misunderstandings of Nietzsche. These ideas, the basis of David's killing, become prime suspects. And David, now hidden in the large chest that will soon provide the party's centerpiece, gets condemned as one of the "weaklings." The unknowing housemaid sets the food on top of the chest that contains the corpse. Brandon sees this as the icing on the cake. Phillip broods like a guilty child.
As the party picks up the question "where's David" occurs with increasing frequency. No one seems to know. David's fiancee arrives. So does her ex-boyfriend. Neither are pleased. Frustration builds. Finally, Brandon and Philip's inspiration, Rupert Cadell, played by a mesmerizing Jimmy Stewart in his first Hitchcock role, shows up. He comes across as intimidating and brash. Someone tells him, "it's good to see you again." He responds coldly, "why?" Brandon brings up "the perfect murder" and his beliefs about superiority. Rupert agrees with everything. He even adds in some bone-chilling nuances of his own. David's father, also an invitee, protests and demands that they stop their macabre conversation. He doesn't even want to hear the theories that Brandon finds so engaging. As if speech somehow bestows validity on ideas. As if ideas could somehow kill. Rupert becomes suspicious, which boils over when, upon his exit, the housemaid accidentally gives him a hat embossed with "DK" inside. David's hat. Rupert confronts the now nervous, and dangerous, duo.
The last ten minutes of the film contain indescribable tension. A gun appears. Ultimate control of the situation depends on its possessor. It changes hands a few times. Rupert sees and hears the consequences of the ideas he once fed Brandon. Reeling, he decides that morality depends on more than concepts. Something mysterious and ineffable bubbles under reprehensible acts. He tells Brandon "There's something deep down inside of you that would allow you to do this, just as there's something deep down inside of me that wouldn't allow it." And then Rupert's clincher, the movie's superquote: "Did you think you were God, Brandon?" Rupert's utterance, which probably had a different resonance for a 1948 audience, restores moral homeostasis. The line slashes Brandon's pretentions like a cutlass through yogurt. By juxtaposing Brandon's action with Rupert's inaction, the movie seems to say that belief in monstrous ideas does not imply a carrying out of reprehensible deeds. Instead, monstrous people, rife with amoral "stuff," that "something" Rupert alluded to, remain the problem. Ideas are off the hook. The film thus reveals a sticky, unanswerable question about human nature. If ideas produce different reactions in different people, then how do amoral acts arise?
In the final scene of this underrated Hitchcock masterpiece, a gun fires out a window. People stir. Sirens bellow. "You're going to die!" someone shouts. But no one in this film will die for mere ideas. Police can't arrest thoughts, and they can't apprehend concepts. "Rope" invites a deep reflection on the dichotomy between those that merely think of ideas and those arrestable folks who, unfortunately, decide to act on them.
Summary of Rope
James Stewart, Farley Granger and John Dall star in this macabre spellbinder, which was inspired by a real-life case of murder. Two thrill-seeking friends (Granger and Dall) strangle a classmate and then hold a party for their victim's family and friends, serving refreshments on a buffet table fashioned from a trunk containing the lifeless body. When dinner conversation revolves around talk of the 'perfect murder', their former teacher (Stewart) becomes increasingly suspicious that his students have turned his intellectual theories into brutal reality. Starring: James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Constance Collier, Joan Chandler, Douglas Dick, Edith Evanson, Dick Hogan Directed by: Alfred HitchcockSimilar DVD Movies
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