Rope (1948) on Netflix
Approved19481h 20mCrimeDramaMysteryThriller
Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan strangle David Kentley and hide the body in a chest. They host a dinner party for David's family, with their former teacher Rupert Cadell among the guests.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.9/10166,661 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan share a Manhattan apartment and regard David Kentley, a friend from their prep school, as their intellectual inferior. They strangle him with a rope and hide the body in an antique wooden chest, a killing they intend as proof of their own superiority. The two then host a dinner party, and Brandon serves the food from the chest itself. The guests, unaware of what has happened, include Janet Walker, who is engaged to David, her former lover Kenneth Lawrence, David's father Mr. Kentley and his aunt Mrs. Atwater. The housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson, arrives to help. Also invited is Rupert Cadell, the prep school housemaster whose talk of Nietzsche's Superman once inspired them.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Rope (1948)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Patrick Hamilton play behind Rope was drawn from a real killing in 1924, in which two University of Chicago students murdered a 14-year-old boy.
- To keep the camera moving through the single apartment set, the walls were mounted on rollers so they could be slid silently aside and put back, while prop men hauled furniture out of the path of the bulky Technicolor camera and returned every piece to its exact place.
- Hitchcock's takes ran up to ten minutes, the length of a camera magazine, and he hid half his cuts by panning into a man's jacket or the back of a piece of furniture until the screen went dark.
- Because a projectionist had to change reels every 20 minutes, Hitchcock cut openly to a new camera setup at those points rather than trying to disguise them.
- Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut that he went back and re-shot the last four or five segments of Rope because he did not like the color of the sunset.
- The Manhattan skyline behind the apartment was the largest backing ever put on a sound stage, with models of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, lights coming on, neon signs and clouds made of spun glass that changed shape eight times during the film.
- James Stewart hated the process, complaining that the camera rather than the actors was what was being rehearsed, and years later said that although only Hitchcock would have tried it, it really did not work.
