ROPE - 1948

Rope is a 1948 American crime film based on the play Rope (1929) by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn (treatment)[2] and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions. Starring James Stewart, John Dall and Farley Granger, it is the first of Hitchcock's Technicolor films, and is notable for taking place in real time and being edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot through the use of long takes.

The original play was said to be inspired by the real-life murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

On a late afternoon, two brilliant young aesthetes, Brandon Shaw (Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Granger), murder a former classmate, David Kentley (Dick Hogan), in their apartment. They commit the crime as an intellectual exercise: they want to prove their superiority by committing the "perfect murder".

After hiding the body in a large antique wooden chest, Brandon and Phillip host a dinner party at the apartment which has a panoramic view of Manhattan's skyline. The guests, unaware of what has happened, include the victim's father Mr. Kentley (Cedric Hardwicke) and aunt Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier) (his mother is not able to attend). Also there is his fiancee, Janet Walker (Joan Chandler) and her former lover Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick), who was once David's close friend.

The film is one of Hitchcock's most experimental and "one of the most interesting experiments ever attempted by a major director working with big box-office names", abandoning many standard film techniques to allow for the long unbroken scenes. Each shot ran continuously for up to ten minutes without interruption. It was shot on a single set, aside from the opening establishing shot street scene under the credits. Camera moves were carefully planned and there was almost no editing.

The walls of the set were on rollers and could silently be moved out of the way to make way for the camera and then replaced when they were to come back into shot. Prop men constantly had to move the furniture and other props out of the way of the large Technicolor camera, and then ensure they were replaced in the correct location. A team of soundmen and camera operators kept the camera and microphones in constant motion, as the actors kept to a carefully choreographed set of cues