Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Osmosis Iron Hitchcock's adaptation of a play that uses the one location "restriction" to it's advantage and uses extremely long takes to further blur the line between film and live theater! Stewart is the only big name in the cast, but it's a solid performance all around.

deschreiber I didn't like this movie at all and am surprised at how highly many people rate it, some even considering it among Hitchcock's greatest. First, it's less a movie than a filming of a stage play. Everything about it is stagey, from the often artificiality of the dialogue to the relentless confining of physical space to a couple of rooms. You can almost see the actors moving to their assigned places, fading toward the back of the stage or moving toward the front according to which conversation the audience is meant to hear. The use of close- ups is a transparent attempt to mask the fact that it's only a filming of a stage play.There's not a trace of believability in the premise of a professor insisting he is completely serious in his Nietzsche-like views about some people being above morality, expounded at length, thinking murder is actually entirely acceptable, but later shocked and horrified when confronted by a real murder. It's one of those stock pieces of artifice common to drawing-room mysteries.James Stewart excels at the end in his decency and humanitarian outrage after discovering that his former students have committed murder. But he is totally miscast in the earlier parts where is is supposed to be a professor overtaken by unconventional ideas about morality and murder. He puts on a slight smile, trying to present an air of intellectual superiority, but it doesn't work at all. It doesn't suit James Stewart-- not because we know James Stewart from other roles but because it is too far from the man's essential nature (or perhaps beyond his acting abilities). George Sanders or Clifton could have pulled it off, but not James Stewart.

maurice yacowar One of Hitchcock's many points of genius was his ability to turn new technical advances to dramatic and thematic purpose. As early as The Ring and The Lodger (both 1927) he fully deployed the armoury of expressionistic devices. When the advent of sound interrupted his production of Blackmail (1929) he found brilliant ways to use the sound, speech, noise, to dramatic effect. Remember the heroine's exaggerated hearing of "knife!" over the breakfast table. From his 3-D Dial M for Murder (1954), one most clearly remembers Grace Kelly's urgent reach into the audience for help against her assailant — and her grasp of the fatal scissors. But there was a more characteristic effect in the opening scene. The mantelpiece in her apartment projects off the left side of the screen, the objects upon it hovering precariously over the audience. More than just thrust, Hitchcock used the 3-D to express the fragility of even those characters' privileged lives. And so to his first colour film, Rope (1948). Typically, Hitchcock did not deploy the technical advance just to enhance the record of reality but rather turned it to thematic purpose. The pre-title shot is downward on a city street. The tone is predominantly grey, punctuated by a green canopy, a passing yellow cab, and in the image centre a pink with white apartment building.The fire hydrant is pink, the mailbox gray. Against that bland palette the title Rope erupts in red, followed by the cast and credits in bright white. That colour scheme, a dominating blandness, represents the object of the two central characters' arrogant and murderous disdain. It's the world of the dull, whom the bright privileged two young men feel authorized to murder. They have black hair and wear dark suits — Brandon navy, Phillip brown — in contrast to the bald father's light grey and grey Rupert's dark grey tweed. Blond Ken wears light brown. In his signature cameo, Hitchcock with a woman walks along the screen in the title sequence, shot from above, himself one of the "little people" at whom the sociopaths sneer. Here Hitchcock aligns himself with the generation of the victim's father, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who takes personal affront at Brandon's theory that the bright have the right to eliminate the dull. The young men's apartment continues that colour design. When the curtains are opened the cityscape outside is an uninflected grey. Because they are after all of that same world as the less valued, less brilliant, their apartment is furnished in light browns and greys. The chest that harbours their corpse is a dark brown, attuned to their colours. But the flowers are white. Even their art holds that pallor: the Milton Avery painting in the dining room, the black and white cubist piece in the living room, the monochrome heads. Their new painting by "an American primitive" is —on the contrary — a colourful abstraction, in the manner of Miro. Brandon's misdescription parallels his performance of innocence about his missing friend. When Rupert returns to confront his former students the city outside has turned to black night, with a scattering of red and green neon signs. The professor's deduction process seems to probe that darkness around the chest. When Rupert produces the rope with which the boys had strangled David, they crumble. Phillip knows the jig is up. At that point we get flashing green and red from the neon outside. The flashing light has two effects. It feels like a throbbing pulse against but heightening the tension, like the metronome Rupert turned on earlier when Phillip tried to hide his nerves by playing the piano. As well, the lights cast an aura of disease, of moral sickliness, over the revelation that Rupert's philosophical theorizing prompted the men to kill their friend. The lights suggest how Phillip feels his teachings have been turned poisonous. Of course there is another technical breakthrough in Rope. Hitchcock famously shot the film in the 10-minute segments allowed by a single film cartridge. That is, each scene represents a continuity, a steady flow in contrast to the master editor's usual fast clip. And again, there is a thematic purpose to that strategy. The continuity in each scene's shooting points to the central theme: the continuity by which an abstract theory can lead to an unfortunate consequence. Rupert feels guilty himself when he learns that his words led to the murderers' deeds. In his intellectual speculations Rupert contended "murder is - or should be - an art. Not one of the 'seven lively', perhaps, but an art nevertheless. And, as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals." His defence of murder is playful: "Think of the problems it would solve: unemployment, poverty, standing in line for theatre tickets…."But two of Rupert's students take his theorizing literally. "The good Americans usually die young on the battlefield, don't they? Well, the Davids of this world merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect murder. Course he, uh, he was a Harvard undergraduate. That might make it justifiable homicide." So they kill their friend and play out their intellectual superiority by entertaining their victim's father and girl-friend over his corpse. The killers' rationale horrifies their teacher. "By what right do you dare to say that there's a superior few to which you belong?" Our responsibility for our words and what they may lead to is one of Hitchcock's most frightening exposures. That theme inheres in the 10-minute takes. But then director Hitchcock was like publisher Rupert in addressing "people (who0 not only can read but actually can think."

zkonedog While making "Rope", Hitchcock and his crew needed to make a decision...either stick to the original English play or completely revamp it for an American audience. By toeing the middle ground, however, Hitch creates a film that takes a suspenseful plot kernel and overshadows it with social class psychobabble.For a basic plot summary, "Rope" sees two young men (John Dall & Farley Granger) carry out their view of the "perfect murder" by killing a fellow chum and hiding him in a wooden chest in their living room while throwing a party that night. At the party, a former preparatory instructor (James Stewart) becomes suspicious of the pair and starts snooping around.The suspense angle of this movie is obvious, as the audience knows the body is in the trunk in the living room and thus anything could possibly happen. Hitchcock manages to make this a legitimately suspenseful (as he is best at) on multiple occasions, providing the best parts of the film.Sadly, there is just something "off" about the overall experience. It is as if, in taking the play and making it a film, the producers somehow lost a key element of the narrative structure. All the talk about class and "the right to murder" is present, but it just doesn't quite click into place well enough to development the characters or make the whole experience work. Simply put, it's like a lot of the original play was "lost in translation".Overall, "Rope" is a decent Hitchcock flick that provides some suspense and great acting (especially the two leads and, of course, Stewart). However, the motives behind the whole experiment seem a bit lost from the original English play (either that or it just doesn't have much coherency altogether). As such, it cannot be considered a "masterpiece" in any sense of the word.