The Talented Mr. Hitchcock

I could not help but dig the following things about "Rope":

* Naturally it's pretty neat how the movie is a series of eight-minute takes (the maximum length of a film reel in 1948). But what's even neater is how, in one of the takes, Hitchcock manages to reorient the fourth wall. For most of the movie, the audience's point of view faces the living room and the chest. But for eight minutes, the camera is oriented from the side, and we see that the chest is up against a wall. It's a deft trick.

* Long takes are hard enough, but the choreography is particularly good. In one scene, Brandon passes through a swinging door into the pantry. When the door swings open, we see him open a drawer. When it swings again, he's dropping the rope into the drawer (nyuk, nyuk). When it closes, the maid asks him a question, and as soon as it open again he answers. It's all very precise; hearts have been bypassed with greater clumsiness.

* To compound the experimentation, Hitchcock does a crazy time compression. The 80-minute movie is ostensibly in real-time, but the action takes place, almost unnoticeably, over the course of an entire afternoon and evening. The compression is utterly convincing, both in terms of plot and character arcs. It's not until later that one realizes, hey, they never had more than a bite of dinner!

* An actress saying "chum" pre-ironically.

* The way that, as in "Rear Window," Stewart's character must find out not who committed a murder -- he already knows that -- but whether a murder was committed. The convention of "Find murder, then find murderer" is cleanly reversed. What's different is that in "Rear Window," Stewart couldn't contain his giddiness: He wanted a murder to have been committed. In "Rope," his character is more sedate and less sedated: Discovering the murder and his worst fears confirmed sends him into despair.

* The final composition. It begs to be soaked in. You have Stewart's character in the foreground, stooped in a chair with his back to the camera. To his left, Phillip is slumped at the piano. To his right, Brandon stands ashen, his "perfect" crime undone by his own brazenness. Behind it all is the sun setting over the New York skyline. Ebert has a theory that the right side of the screen indicates calm and the left side indicates anxiety and tension. I'm not sure if that's the case here, but an argument for it could be made, especially with Rupert sitting slightly to the left of center.