Rope
Shaw Brandon and Philip Morgan kill a friend, David Kentley, strangling him with a rope. That afternoon, they offer a party after hidding the body in an archon. It will be used in the meantime as a table in the party, to which David's father, aunt, girlfriend and ex-tuthor Rupert Cadell are engaged.This strange behaviour is caused because of their opinion (which, as a matter of fact, is a result of Cadell's influence on them, as he was their teacher) that murder is a kind of 'special art', only available to those few human beings possessing a superior intelligence, so they want to create their own artistical masterpiece.
Although, during the party Philip's weak character and culpability feelings will make Cadell start to suspect of something strange going on so, that he'll later uncover the tragical way his theories have been misunderstood by Brandon and Philip.
'Rope' is one of the supposed "weakest" movies in Hitchcock's filmography, due to the strange experiment he tried: the film was build up using of extremely long takes (approximately 10 minutes each one) so, that the camera's perspective was kept almost continuous throughout the film. This fact provoked scenic planes to be kept dangerously static.
Besides, the fact that the scene is reduced to a single room contributes to make some stages a bit boring, just because there isn't a dominant element to pay attention to; at some times it almost seems that the players talk only in order to avoid silence.
My opinion is not so negative; since the first time I watched this movie, I found a kind of subjacent charm, really hard to describe, but which made me choose this film as one of my favourites. Now I'm fully convinced that this feeling was caused by the fact, that suspense is not achieved here by building up a determined mistery, an unsolved murder or an absurd injustice , but by introducing the constant danger of David's body's discovery, a danger that lasts until the very end of the movie.
On the other hand, it's interesting to consider that, in spite of the simplicity in the scene setting, some symbols introduced by Hitchcock are really masterfully engineered, for instance, the way Brandon ties up the books, the special atmosphere created by the chandeliers on the archon or the contrast between the cold, ironic and calculator Brandon and the weak, nervous and almost embarrassed Philip. This contrast is, at some stages, the most important action element in the movie, as well as the link which maintains coherence.
