“It’s supposed to be about homosexuals, and you don’t even see the boys kiss each other,” Jean Renoir once said of ROPE.
The astute observation wraps its hands around the black heart of the movie, where all things subversive were hidden in plain sight by bisexual screenwriter Arthur Laurents—in brilliant collusion with Hitchcock and the film’s two gay leading stars: Arthur’s lover Farley Granger and John Dall. Hitchcock’s first color production, ROPE’s nihilistic narrative unfolds in deceptively distracting Technicolor as virtually a single continuous shot, with the artful aid of hidden “cuts.” Adapted from a stage play based on the infamous 1924 Leopold and Loeb case, in which two young male lovers murdered a 14-year-old boy in cold blood, Laurents’ script amplifies the sordid true-crime tale by depicting men whose lawless philosophy drives their sadistic character motivations into an inescapable darkness.
“The film is so chilly you could ice champagne in it or place it around a silver serving dish of fresh caviar… That ROPE does become emotionally involving has nothing to do with character identification and everything to do with watching a cinema master at work, as he denies himself the usual tools of his trade to find out just how effective the camera can be, working more or less on its own.” —Vincent Canby, New York Times
“...The gaze of society into a mirror whose postwar disillusioned reflection stares back at itself self-consciously, ambiguously under the veil of homophobia. Repressed in the shadows of the low-key lighting of noir, homosexuality could be insinuated and denied just as easily as it could be developed.” —Gabrielle Golenda, Posture Magazine
“Killing a man, and getting away with it...just to feed one's own intellectual vanity, is a hideous, amoral stunt, but it's just the kind of trick that Hitchcock excels at. For the director...murder was an art, and when he made ROPE he had a stunt of his own that he wanted to pull off.” —Pamela Hutchinson, Guardian
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