Rich Man’s Carnage: both movies are strong limited storytelling and excellent adaptations of stage plays. Honestly, it’s hard to choose between these two as they are both exceptional but Rope gets the edge for being filled to the brim with wordplay.
★★★★★
I have always secretly dreaded Alfred Hitchcock movies. I was afraid that I wouldn’t like them and that I’d either 1) need to pretend to like them or 2) come off as intellectually inferior when talking about movies. It’s nothing to do with Hitchcock specifically, but I’ve found that I’ve tended to shy away from all kinds of popular and critically acclaimed directors. I’ve fought this battle continuously over time with the Coen Brothers, Spielberg, Kubrick, Coppola, et al. I had seen the Birds and Vertigo but honestly can’t remember more than a few scenes from those movies. And because of all of this, and because he likes to see me squirm, David assigned me Rope. And I loved it.
Rope (1948) is a simple story about two friends who decide that they are going to murder a mutual acquaintance of theirs just to see if they can get away with it. I’m normally very spoiler conscious in these posts, but all of this is revealed in the first 4 minutes of the movie. After dispatching of their friend, they hide his body in a trunk in the living room and begin preparing for the party they are about to throw for the deceased’s parents, almost-fiancé, former best friend, and former professor / mentor.
The entire movie takes place in two rooms of the Manhattan apartment of Brandon, one of the murderers. The story unfolds over the course of an evening and the film plays out in real time. This movie is famous for Hitchcock’s attempt to make a movie with seamless editing, but I don’t want to focus on that aspect of this movie. While his techniques were probably excellent, and it did make the movie very fluid and fun to watch, I would have loved this movie regardless. What I really find so impressive about this movie is the incredible limitations Hitchcock imposes on himself.
This movie is confined to only two locations, it has only 8 total characters and takes place over the course of no more than 2 hours. Any one of these constraints on a movie would be impressive enough, but this movie has all three. Limited Storytelling is a term apparently coined by The Film Vault podcast (a favorite of mine and David) that focuses on movies that incredibly narrow their scope by time, location, or subject. Rope is the grandfather of all of these movies. After watching this movie, I better understood the phrase “constraint drives genius”. By remaking a play, and imposing the same kind of limitations on his film, Hitchcock is able to play out an entire story in an 80 minute period that has all of the strife of a Greek tragedy and all of the suspense of an Edgar Allan Poe story.
With the film’s “protagonists”, Hitchcock gives us two entirely different types of villain. Brandon is an incredibly devious character with a supreme god complex. His partner, Philip, is more human and allows the weight of their crime to get to him as the film drags on. He provides an excellent foil to show just how disturbed Brandon is. Brandon flirts with revealing the truth, through subtle word play and hint dropping, throughout the night with little care for his own freedom or Philip’s conscience. Brandon is an all-time great movie villain. This is the kind of character comic-book movies should strive for. In fact, this is the exact kind of character that was stripped away from Watchmen and left me missing my favorite character from the source material even though they were supposedly included in the film. Comic nerds will catch my drift there. A great villain is an easy way to elevate any story. Rope manages to build suspense not from trying to figure out who-done-it but by riding the dramatic irony of the dinner party and the sociopathic idiosyncrasies of it’s main character. Brandon helped carry me through the simplicity of the story and stay riveted through the entire evening I spent with him.
Rope is available to rent for 2.99 on iTunes and Amazon and is totally worth it.
Next week David is going to watch Moon. Finally. Sam Rockwell is at his peak, and that’s enough reason to see any movie.
cinemateur 