ROPE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 540, 28 October 1949, Page 19

ROPE

(Warrier) O -successful was the advance publicity about Rope’s technical virtuosity that it appears a little disappointing in the screening, although anyone with an interest in the technical side of film-making should make a point of seeing it, to study theeffects of Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated "ten-minute take." The 80-minute screen play is ‘photographed in eight reels of continuous action-that is to say, there is not a single cut in the whole thing, apart from where one reel joins on to the next. This is unusual, but not a revolutionary device, Hitchcock has discarded the conventional method in which numbers of short fragmentary shots are fused together in the cuttingroom into scenes and sequences to form one complete piece of narrative. Instead, the cameta follows the actors continuously around the room in which most of the action takes place, rather like a silent witness at an absorbing though somewhat gruesome melodrama. This makes for a total effect less artificial than in a normally-produced film. There are none of the close-ups, flashbacks, or montages that are used in orthodox direction to heighten the visual intensity of the drama. Consequently dramatic sharpness has to be obtained in other ways-by more sustained acting by the players, more deliberate planning of each word or gesture’s significance beforehand, and more subtle use of the camera itself. It glides rapidly about the set, following now one performer and now another, or watching the unusual behaviour of one while it listens to the conversation of others just outside the range of vision. The plot will be familiar to those who have read Patrick Hamilton’s play. Two precocious undergraduates decide to kill a friend, principally (in the film) to prove their superiority to him. They op the strangled body in‘a large coffinike chest, and as a final touch* ("the signature of the artist," the chief murderer calls it) serve supper off it to the boy’s father, fiancée, and friends. Branddon, the youth who conceives this exquisite piece of devilry, is played with just the right touch of smug depravity

by John Dall. His companion Philip (played by Farley Granger), a less hardened aesthete who goes to pieces under James Stewart’s questioning, is not so well portrayed. ' Stewart himself is the former housemaster at whose academic door the whole business must eventually be laid, since it was the influence of his Nietzschian theorising that led the egotistical Brandon to carry out his little scheme. ‘Murder is, or should be," the latter says, "an art. The power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create." The murder is thus made to appear not so much an experiment in effete sensation as a masterpiece of depraved. artistry--a masterpiece that doesn’t come off. Stewart is unfortunate in that he had such rabid pupils, but their act is not‘ his responsibility, as he realises when he fires the shots which summon society to mete out their due punishment. In an intense but overdeclamatory denunciation he states that there must have been something already rotten about the characters of the two young men which led them to translate his theories into such morbid practice, a course which no normal person would dream of taking. (A friend of mine basely suggested that the film would have been more psychologically interesting if he had fallen in with their plans, although the plot would then have been much: more difficult to resolve.) Rope is undoubtedly a technical tour de force, although I found the transitions from one reel to the next disconcertingly abrupt (this may have been a fault in the projection rqom) and the opening shot, showing the murder actually béing committed, seemed a dramatic flaw. The obyious conclusion is that the devices used here are suited only to a very special type of screen play, and are unlikely to be repeated by other directors. Incidentally, it may be worth mentioning to those interested in these things that the bizarre little melody played by Philip on the piano is the first of Francis Poulenc’s Trois Mouvements Pernetuels.