Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948)

The important element in Rope is neither the corpse in the chest nor the commonplace cocktail party given by two young New York snobs; it is rather the simultaneous presence of these two orders of facts, the thorough amalgamation of two stylistics genres, the realistic and the thriller. Over the two previously pointed out kinds of "suspense" is superimposed a third line of current which is the very opposite of suspense:  the deliberate continuity in time and space -- the famous formal postulate that slips through the back door and into the heart of the matter, in this case the film's affective and moral climate.
--Eric Rohmer & Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock:  The First Forty-Four Films, translated by Stanley Hochman (Frederick Ungar, 1979, originally published in French in 1957).

Hitchcock kept a number of films to which he had the rights out of circulation in the 70's; after Hitchcock's death in 1980 they came back into circulation.  Vertigo (1958) and Rear Window (1954)got the most attention, understandably, but Rope is a fascinating film not only for its unusual style but for its rich content, each reinforcing the other.

1. Rope is filmed in ten continuous takes on one set; when it is time to change reels, after ten minutes, the camera pans across something black and the illusion of continuity is maintained.

2. Rope was Hitchcock's first film in color and has an impressive palette, the colors change as the sky darkens outside (there is an enormous window showing New York City).

3. Based on the Leopold and Loeb case there is a murder in Rope by two male students, of someone they consider "inferior."  The body is put in a chest on which food and drinks are served.  The two murderers have been influenced by their professor's lectures on Nietzsche and the professor is invited to the party. The two students are obviously lovers,something Hitchcock's handles with considerable delicacy, especially considering the censorship of the time.

4. In the original play by Patrick Hamilton it was not known until the end that there was a body in the chest; Hitchcock shows the murder at the start of the film, once again demonstrating the use of suspense rather than surprise.