Rope

If you've read many of my reviews, you know that two of my favorite directors ever are Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. The two of them use the language of movies to tell stories in such interesting ways, and tell stories so provocative and transgressive for the times in which they were released. I mention this because, coming into Rope, I expected a couple things: great acting (it has Jimmy Stewart in it, so DUH), excellent direction (it is well into the Hollywood years, when his style had really gelled), and at least a pretty good overall movie. What I did not expect was that this would be Hitchcock channeling things Welles had done and would do down the line. Not literally, Welles had no role in this movie whatsoever. Still, discovering that two circles of the Venn diagram of my favorite filmmakers unofficially overlapped made my heart go crazy. Rope's concept is simple enough, and it's all done in one location, an apartment. Two young men, Brandon and Phillip, have committed the perfect murder of their friend David. Brandon is bold, cocky, and downright sociopathic; Phillip is nervous, regretful, and afraid of Brandon's cavalier attitude. They dump him in a chest in the living room, and then have the audacity to throw a dinner party right after. A dinner party with the murder victim's dad, good friend, and girlfriend right in the room. The movie is a cat-and-mouse tale of guests making idle chit-chat that they don't know references the corpse in the room, Brandon getting increasingly daring and almost dropping intentional clues just because, Phillip getting increasingly nervous, and their former schoolmaster, Rupert (Jimmy Stewart) getting increasingly suspicious. The direction of this movie is the most stand-out element of it, and there are so many layers to it. The snappy dialogue that flows from person to person and location to location demands your attention, as there are so many hints and references to the murder and the morality of the players in it. Hitchcock moves the camera and the focus of the movie in and out of these conversations as needed, sometimes even letting conversations happen off-screen while pointing the camera at something else entirely, forcing the viewer to process sound and sight separately. For example, there's a scene where the camera plants itself right next to the chest containing the corpse, focusing past it on the dining room and kitchen door across the apartment; the housekeeper goes back and forth, taking things away that were sitting on the chest, putting things away, cleaning up, and all the while, the chest and the dead body sit there in the foreground, a terrible monolith nobody (aside from the killers and us) are aware of. Hitchcock's unconventional camerawork and framing of scenes forces the viewer to pay sharper attention than normal, but it also adds a feeling of unease. We lack that unease at first because we see the murder in the first 90 seconds. Hitchcock makes us accomplices from the start. The camera's refusal to just settle in to standard chest-high one- and two-shots puts us back into a space of discomfit and suspense. We never miss crucial information, but we can never predict where we're going next. That is amplified by the direction's second big trick, the long takes. Rope has ten edits. Just ten, and half of them are disguised with blackouts and tight shots. The last two segments are the shortest at just over 4 and 5 minutes apiece; every other segment is between 7 and 10 minutes of unbroken movement and dialogue. The camera floats all over the apartment; people leave the room to get a drink or dessert or make a phone call, and conversations happen in other parts of the apartment while we're focused on other people. From a filmmaking standpoint, it is downright brilliant. These long takes, combined with the floating camera, are the Wellesian touch I mentioned -- they pop up in movies like Citizen Kane, The Lady From Shanghai, and especially his masterpiece, Touch Of Evil (it's so much better than Kane, fight me). Long takes are nothing new, even at this time, and longer takes have been used to great effect, like 1917. But Rope uses them not as a "look at what I can do" gimmick, but to add to the movie's unconventional and unnerving flowing nature. It puts you in the room; first, you're over by the piano, listening to Rupert grill Phillip. Then you're over on the couch, listening to Brandon preach about his philosophy about justifiable homicide and superior/inferior people, and then you're listening to Janet (David's girlfriend) and Kenneth (David's buddy) talk about their break-up many moons ago and get past their awkwardness. Having nothing but long takes that are stitched together to be as close to one unbroken take as possible kills any illusion of time dilation that editing can force upon a movie. This takes place in real time, and that amplifies the tension. Every moment that passes by feels like another minute closer to Brandon and Phillip getting away with it, but also a minute closer to getting discovered. It puts a ticking clock aspect into the movie that it otherwise doesn't have. All of this elevates what is already a fun movie anyway. We follow Brandon and Phillip, not Rupert; we see Rupert gnawing on his suspicions from their point of view, not his. We see Phillip's insecurities and pangs of guilt play out from next to him. And we see Brandon's smug self-satisfaction manifest into a belief he is intellectually and morally superior to everybody and therefore incapable of being caught by anybody. Hitchcock doesn't dwell on why David was chosen to be murdered. Brandon did it for the thrills, to see if he could get away with it, and to prove to himself he is superior to others. David, his friend, could've just as well been a hobo or a movie star or a grocery clerk. All Rope is concerned with is those three people and how they interact; Brandon's egomania, Phillip's sweaty insecurity, and Rupert pulling at the threads nobody else sees. My journey through Hitchcock's filmography has proven to be quite surprising in places. The best surprises are finding amazing movies that aren't the big movies everybody knows -- Psycho, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Rear Window. Rope has such a simple concept, but it is easy for a filmmaker to fumble the ball on a simple concept. Hitchcock could do this kind of movie in his sleep, but he takes it a step further and makes the simple look like so much more. I won't assume there will be more surprises like this in store, but I've got a hunch that chances are good.