Two men attempt to prove they committed the perfect crime by hosting a dinner party after strangling their former classmate to death.
EN
“Shooting Rope was a little like unpuzzling a Rube Goldberg drawing. A long time ago I said that I would like to film in two hours a fictional story that actually happens in two hours. I wanted to do a picture with no time lapses — a picture in which the camera never stops. In Rope I got my wish. It was a picture unlike any other I've ever directed. True, I had experimented with a roving camera in isolated sequences in such films as Spellbound, Notorious, and The Paradine Case. But until Rope came along, I had been unable to give full rein to my notion that a camera could photograph one complete reel at a time, gobbling up 11 pages of dialogue on each shot, devouring action like a giant steam shovel. As I see it, there's nothing like continuous action to sustain the mood of actors, particularly in a suspense story. In Rope the entire action takes place between the setting of the sun and the hour of darkness. There are a murder, a party, mounting tension, detailed psychological characterizations, the gradual discovery of the crime and the solution. Yet all this consumes less than two hours of real life as well as "reel" life. (Actually, it took us 35 days to wrap up the picture.) The sight of a "take" under these conditions is something new under the Hollywood sun. It's like being backstage at one of those madhouses that comedian Joe Cook used to devise when he was explaining why he couldn't imitate the four Hawaiians.”
Alfred Hitchcock1
- 1Alfred Hitchcock, “My Most Exciting Picture,” Popular Photography, November 1948.
