Hitchcock relies on sweeping camera movements that move about Phillip and Brandon’s Manhattan apartment, like a pair of wandering eyes taking in the scenery.

The film opens on a banal sidewalk. People and cars, diminished by the high perspective of the camera, pass by insignificantly. There is nothing particularly extraordinary about the scene, that is, until the film reveals through its only true cut, a sinister scene unveiling high above the city.

The aggressive and arrogant Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and his quiet, mouse-like roommate Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) have just strangled their college friend David Kently in the middle of their living room. They neatly tuck him into a large chest, and start making preparations for the dinner party they are hosting later in the day, their guests to include David’s father, his fiancée Janet (Joan Chandler), and their former professor Rupert Cadell (James Stewart).

In 1948, Alfred Hitchcock made the film, “Rope,” from which its opening scene I just described. It has been largely overshadowed by Hitchcock’s other films, but it remains one of his most fascinating.

“Rope” is both similar to Hitchcock’s other work, and radically different from it. The film is made up of eight 10-minute shots, the only noticeable cut occurring in the first few moments of the film. The rest of the shots are cleverly disguised in zooms into objects, like dress jackets and the infamous chest; the hidden cuts only done out of technical necessity (a film camera could only hold a 400 foot canister of film).

Hitchcock relies on sweeping camera movements that move about Phillip and Brandon’s Manhattan apartment, like a pair of wandering eyes taking in the scenery. He meticulously created the cityscape outside of the window, complete with both moving clouds and shifting lights. Likewise, Hitchcock’s camera sprawls across the apartment, examining its many carefully arranged trinkets at length.

The most interesting aspect of the film is clearly the relationship between Brandon and Phillip. While recent critics have identified undertones of homosexuality in the film, and those who worked on the film have acknowledged that they all knew that the pair was gay, people who saw the film when it came out, including the censors, failed to pick up on it.

The implications seem quite clear today. Yet there is more to the pair than their taboo sexuality.

Brandon is clearly the dominant one; he seems the most excited by the murder of David and by the subsequent staging of the dinner party around David’s body. Brandon sees murder as an art and himself a veritable Picasso—he dances between the satisfaction of getting away with it, and with the desire for someone to know, just so he can be admired for his brilliance.

Phillip is much more agonized by the events; he is unstable and spends most of the party on edge, while Brandon is disarmingly at ease, taking great pride in the normalcy of everything.

Dall and Granger are both brilliant in their portrayals of Brandon and Phillip. They bring enough subtlety to their characters to create a dense portrait of men that goes beyond serial killers.

Dall’s “superhero complex,” his obsession with being extraordinary and Phillip’s struggle to understand those desires makes fascinating drama. There are few contemporary performances between two actors that top this one.

James Stewart, not surprisingly, fits quite well into the shoes of ex-professor Rupert Cadwell. He plays the calm, collected intellectual who has been lured into the game by Brandon, who is desperate for Rupert’s approval.

Rupert struggles to unravel Brandon’s and Phillip’s guise, and wrap his head around Brandon’s sociopathic behavior. The film boils over when, much to Brandon’s delight, Rupert discovers what the two have done.

“Did you think you were God, Brandon?” he questions, seemingly afraid of the answer.

Hitchcock creates tension not by editing, as most filmmakers would when creating a thriller. Instead the lack of cutting puts the audience on edge—we are given the privilege to see everything, and this makes us feel uncomfortable as if we have been made privy to something that is deeply private.

The camera often stops on a table arrangement, as the action and dialogue continue off-screen, and we struggle to find the significance of such a camera movement. Hitchcock is playing cat-and-mouse with us, just as Brandon plays with Rupert.

“Cat mouse, cat mouse! Which is the cat and which is the mouse?” Phillip screams.

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