Rope (1948)

Rope is the Reader’s Digest version of Crime and Punishment.  It even knows this because it mentions Dostoevsky’s famous, famously bloated novel.  You see, there are two guys who want to commit a murder just for the thrill of it.  They do incredibly stupid things–like have a dinner party ten minutes after murdering their victim, with the corpse inside a chest, which serves as the dinner table.  They even tell stories about one another.  “Hey,” one of them asks a guest, “did you know that Johnny used to strangle chickens back home on the farm?”

The point is that these two young men have been influenced by the high philosophy of the equally stupid.  Privileged men, they say, have a right to kill.  After all, “good” and “evil” are mere constructs.  This is what Jimmy Stewart’s character, Rupert Cadell, has been espousing his whole life.  He’s the teacher of these two murderers, and the intellectual catalyst for their dirty deeds.  So Rope’s simple message is, bad ideas have bad consequences. Words of wisdom, grasshopper.

Cadell gets suspicious at the dinner party pretty quickly, in fact too quickly.  He’s supposed to be an aloof professor who preaches amorality in the classroom, but when he gets to his New York dinner parties, he’s apparently on the lookout for subtle clues that point to lurking criminals.  In order to reach its resolution, Rope needs to expose the murderers.  But unlike Crime and Punishment, the murderers don’t deliberately turn themselves in.  No, there’s no conscience for these fellows.  Instead, it’s the professor who’s the hero, the one who converts in mid-movie from nihilist to moralist.  We suppose the converted Cadell is what the American general public would like its professors to be: champions of truth, freedom-fighters for free speech and inquiry of mind, devotees to ancient wisdom and morality.  Cadell’s conversion is a total fantasy–ever seen a Marxist or an atheist  recant all he’s ever espoused at a dinner party?–but the fact that our storytellers even dream up this fantasy tells us something about who and what we value.

It’s obvious that the two murderers are homosexuals.  These days, we’re all aware of the subtleties.  Back then, in 1948, surely not everybody was.  They could only make the movie with no obvious innuendo back then, which gives whiners today reason enough to complain about the days of Draconian censorship.  Of course, censorship today is worse, in its own way. They couldn’t make this movie at all in 2008.  Not unless they wanted to depict homosexuals as murdering nihilists who delight in strangling others for the pleasure of it.  Nope, then everybody’s P.C. alert button would go off, like an armored knight walking through airport security.

In our opinion, Hitchcock got a little too cute with Rope.  All the action takes place in a small apartment, and the movie’s shot so that it looks like one continuous shot.  It probably wasn’t, but since it looks like that, our Hollywood-induced ADD kicked in.  We’ve seen too many movies like Transformers and Armageddon, where there’s a cut every two seconds.  Rope has seemingly no cuts in 80 minutes.  Put a bunch of people in one room watching this movie, and you’ll have a roomful of fidgety maniacs in fifteen minutes.  So get a straight-jacket and some tranquilizer before you press “Play.”

Entertainment: 5.5

Intelligence: 4

Morality: whatever