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The most formally daring of Hitchcock’s thrillers also happens to be his most distressingly perverse, heralding the master’s burgeoning fascination with the logic, psychology, and inexplicable appeal of murder. In this case, he’s dealing with unmotivated murder, as he follows in near-real-time the diabolical exploits of two college students who slay one of their peers and then stage a dinner party merely to examine their guests’ suspicions over the man’s absence – all of this for the sake of carrying some radical academic theorizing into full practice. As the principal photography is comprised of only a dozen or so shots, the cuts between them disguised by momentary obscuring of the image, the audience is automatically compelled into complicity with the crime from its execution all the way to its necessary final ramifications. The men’s tyrannical experiment transforms into something of a sickly alluring game and then, on satiric terms, emerges as a send-up of the model theatrical dinner party by undercutting the dialogue, generally prim and hackneyed as it is, with unwitting references to the corpse occupying the same room with the participants. Apart from everything else, this breed of black comedy is delicious. Later, though, the climactic “moral apotheosis” articulated by the Jimmy Stewart character serves to emphasize the iniquity underlying what we’ve found so fiendishly entertaining with the whole affair, and though this all may sound too preachy on first viewing, it actually delivers a rather intriguing point beyond face value, leading us to consider (through exaggerated means, no doubt) the inability of intellectualism to distinguish idealized hypothesis from a complex human reality. |
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Rope |
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capsule review by André de Alencar Lyon |
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Alfred Hitchcock |
