Rope (motion picture)

Rope (motion picture), drama about two prep students who decide to murder a colleague to assert their status as intellectually superior beings, based on the 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton and inspired by the real life murder case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Released in 1948, this film was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and was shot without visible cuts in an attempt to make a single-shot, 80-minute film. Two students decide to kill another student because of what they see as his general mediocrity, but also to impress their admired iconoclastic professor, Rupert Cadell (played by James Stewart). They invite their friends to a party, and Cadell arrives to find that the boys have warped his cynical philosophies into a sort of amoral, classist code. As the dead student’s body lies hidden in a trunk in the room, Cadell suspects that the boys are up to something and sets out to discover what. This story was also presented in the films Compulsion (1959) and Swoon (1992).

Director

• Alfred Hitchcock

Cast

• James Stewart (Rupert Cadell)
• John Dall (Shaw Brandon)
• Farley Granger (Philip)
• Joan Chandler (Janet Walker)
• Cedric Hardwicke (Mr. David Kentley's father)
• Constance Collier (Mrs. Atwater)
• Edith Evanson (Mrs. Wilson the governess)
• Douglas Dick (Kenneth Lawrence)
• Dick Hogan (David Kentley)

Trivia

• This film was made to look as if it were an 80-minute continuous roll of film. Since a 35-millimeter motion-picture camera takes 8-minute spools of film at a time, every 8 minutes the camera panned to a dark object or into a person to create a quick blackout so each subsequent roll of film could be edited in seamlessly. Director Hitchcock shot roughly one 8-minute segment per day. Several segments were completely reshot because Hitchcock wasn't happy with the red color of the sunset.

Quotes

• Brandon: “Nobody commits murder just for the experience of committing it. Nobody except us.”