Rope
This was my 19th Hitchcock film. First thing i'd like to say is i personally think this would've benefited from an extra 15-20 minutes at the start, it just drops us right into the murder which could work but i don't think it did completely here. Even a few scenes of how they met and how the murder came up, or whatever it wouldn't have to be that just a bit more time to build a rapport between the characters before the murder, just my opinion don't know if anyone else will agree. That being said i thought this was very good.
I was fairly familiar with what it is about since i've read about the Leopold and Loeb case before. Both Farley Granger and John Dall did a good job of playing these young, unhinged privileged guys, and their characters were clearly alot different from each other. James Stewart was good as always, loved him as the suspicious one who these nutcases believe will approve of their actions. I'd say i preferred his other one-location film that i've seen Dial M For Murder, i preferred the story personally. Interesting to shoot it using a bunch of long takes edited to make it look like one long shot. Of course i've seen the same thing before so i'm not as impressed with it now but it is always interesting to watch. Very good film, i'd say i preferred Shadow of a Doubt but not greatly. Sorry i don't have more to say it's just after watching the documentary right after it i don't want to just repeat some of the stuff that was in that.
Rope Unleashed
Almost watched this last night because it was late and this was only 30 minutes long, glad i didn't since it kind of ruins a few things. Very interesting stuff. If you have access to it i recommend watching it after Rope. If you are going to i wouldn't read any further here because i basically say what it is about.
The people featured in the doc are: Arthur Laurents who wrote the screenplay, Farley Granger who played Phillip, Hume Cronyn who did the script treatment and Patricia Hitchcock his daughter. It heavily focuses on the homosexual subtext between the characters Brandon and Phillip; didn't mention it in my write-up since it was talked about so much here. I'm guessing most will pick up on it without seeing this anyway since their relationship is pretty uh... intense haha. It's mentioned that the film did alot better in Europe because attitudes were alot more relaxed to this but they still had to heavily mask it, i also found it interesting that this was originally a British play and there was great difficulty transferring the british dialogue to american as well as fitting in the british class system which is a strong part of the original play but America didn't have the same kind of social structure. Apparently, Cary Grant turned down James Stewarts role and Montgomery Clift turned down the role of either Brandon or Phillip because they didn't want to be associated with homosexuality. Keep in mind this is secondhand from Farley Granger who claims Hitch told him this. Farley actually sounded pretty critical of Stewarts performance, not really his performance actually more his character because he believed he didn't work with Brandon and Phillip the way he was supposed to. He also felt that some of the suspense didn't work of a few things.
Anyway no point in going on summarizing everything. A solid accompaniment to the film.
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