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List Price: $19.98
Buy New: $13.63
You Save: $6.35 (32%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $10.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 107 reviews)
Sales Rank: 14516
Category: DVD
Actors: John Dall, Farley Granger, James Stewart
Publisher: Universal Studios
Studio: Universal Studios
Brand: Universal Studios
Label: Universal Studios
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Full Screen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), Spanish (Original Language), French (Dubbed)
Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD
Running Time: 81 minutes
Number Of Items: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Picture Format: Pan & Scan
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.7 x 0.6
UPC: 025192067129
EAN: 0025192067129
ASIN: B000055Y11
Release Date: March 6, 2001
Theatrical Release Date: August 28, 1948
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
An experimental film masquerading as a standard Hollywood thriller. The plot of Rope is simple and based on a successful stage play: two young men (John Dall and Farley Granger) commit murder, more or less as an intellectual exercise. They hide the body in their large apartment, then throw a dinner party. Will the body be discovered? Director Alfred Hitchcock, fascinated by the possibilities of the long-take style, decided to shoot this story as though it were happening in one long, uninterrupted shot. Since the camera can only hold one 10-minute reel at a time, Hitchcock had to be creative when it came time to change reels, disguising the switches as the camera passed behind someone's back or moved behind a lamp. In later years Hitchcock wrote off the approach as misguided, and Rope may not be one of Hitchcock's top movies, but it's still a nail-biter. They don't call him the Master of Suspense for nothing. James Stewart, as a suspicious professor, marks his first starring role for Hitchcock, a collaboration that would lead to the masterpieces Rear Window and Vertigo. --Robert Horton
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Customer Reviews: Read 102 more reviews...
 Don't get too Fixated on the Editing Style! May 13, 2006
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Rope is a great piece of film that really requires more than one viewing, even from people who may not have enjoyed it for its story. First time round of course you get caught up in the whole 'no edits' thing because chances are quite high somebody has told you about how Hitchcock experimented with just running the reels to their end and cutting only when he required a reel change. You undoubtably go into this movie with that in mind and are quite determined to find flaws... ultimatly for the first ten - twenty minutes you do so, but then you forget and just watch it because its a really thrilling story. Set inside the three rooms (plus entrance hall) of a 1940s New York apartment, it never leaves. In fact it barely leaves the sitting room where the trunk stands dominating the forground, concealing the body of young David from the party guests eating off his coffin.
The movie finishes and you realise 'hey, I forgot to look for the edits!' So you watch it again, this time having been captured by the chilling and albeit slightly sick story of murder commited for sake of murder, you are sure you will not miss a thing this time. But then you start noticing the comedy that you didn't quite pick up first time. Especially David's girlfriend Janet, she is quite a remarkable character, quirky, uncomfortable and strangely attractive even though she says the word 'chum' far too many times. And also Rupert, played by the legendary James Stewart, his interaction with the other characters is priceless, in particular the way he makes fun of women's discussion techniques and how they don't really say anything worthwhile but yet they know exactly what they are talking about. All of a sudden the movie is over and yet again you've forgotten to take note of Hitchcock's edits. Keep trying, and eventually you'll see what the fuss is about, but by then you don't care because you've fallen in love with the movie as a piece of Hitchcock genius.
I would suggest avoiding the 'Rope Unleashed' making of simply because it doesn't really tell you anything about how it was made, it just talks about how the two main characters are homosexual. You can take that as fact or not, either way it doesn't change the story any, and to be honest until I watched that doc I hadn't noticed it.
The Moose Hole - Murder or Justifiable Homicide? March 30, 2006
Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, the first of what would eventually become four collaborative efforts with actor and close friend James Stewart, was based not only on a popular British play, Rope's End (the re-titling given to the play when it came to Broadway after the release of the 1948 Hitchcock picture) by Patrick Hamilton, but an actual event as well. Hitchcock much like Hume Cronyn and Henry Traver's characters in Shadow of a Doubt was quite the aficionado when it came to famous murder cases, using many he followed as a child in England as inspiration for some of his early works. It is no surprise then to see why Rope peeked his interest. Hamilton's play was based on the murder trial of Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb, more commonly referred to as simply Leopold and Loeb, two wealthy and homosexual University of Chicago students who inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of advanced `supermen' sought to commit the perfect murder. Their victim, fourteen-year old Bobby Franks, was bludgeoned with a chisel, suffocated to death, burned with acid so as to make identification all the more difficult, and dumped in a sewage pipe. Avoiding a jury trial, the two `men' were given ninety-nine years to life, though neither one served their full sentence (Loeb was killed in prison at age thirty-five and Leopold was paroled in 1958 and moved to Puerto Rico).
James Stewart was drafted into the United States Army Air Corps one year prior to the United States' official entry into World War II, serving admirably in combat and rising to the rank of colonel. However, upon his return from war in the mid-1940s, he became increasingly disillusioned with Hollywood and was on the verge of quitting the movie business altogether. Stewart took up Hitchcock's offer to play Rupert Cadell in his feature film adaptation of Rope if he was allowed to wave his salary for a percentage of the film's box office gross. It was accepted.
Rope is a very short film, even by today's standards, clocking in at one hour and twenty-five minutes. Therefore everything rides on the performances of the three main leads and Stewart for one does so with gusto. In the Patrick Hamilton play, Rupert in addition to being the boys' former schoolmaster was also their one-time gay lover. It however makes more sense for Rupert to be played off as Brandon and Phillip's surrogate father then their lover because as a surrogate father he must bear witness to the sadistic manipulation of his ideas and face the difficult task of admit to his own `sons' that he was wrong in what he said. It is even more painful therefore for him to have to turn his `children' into the authorities for something he taught them but never believed they would ever seriously consider. The final scene in which Stewart wrestles with himself over the gun is sheer brilliance. Does he shoot the gun out the window and alert the police, take justice into his own hands and kill the murderers himself, or in a fit of disparity turn the gun on himself? Chilling and intriguing to the bitter end, Stewart's convincing performance truly makes this film the classic that it is.
John Dall is downright nefarious as Brandon Shaw, the `mastermind' if you will behind this experimentation in Nietzsche's `superman' theory and how such men are above the moral limitations of their inferiors. It is to say the least a bit unnerving to see a sense of accomplishment, even distinct pleasure, come across his face after strangling young David to death and then proceeding to host a social get-together with the father and girlfriend of the victim in the same room as the trunk containing the victim's corpse. Dall uses witty yet dry, dark humor throughout the film, a brutal honesty which is seriously unwarranted in areas, such as immediately following David's death, but this rightfully falls in line with his character. This is a man whose obsession with playing God alienates everyone's feelings but his own. His arrogance, his avid fixation on proving not to his former headmaster but to himself that he can get away with murder, proves to be his downfall.
Phillip Morgan, played eloquently by then-relatively unknown Farley Granger, is the precise opposite of Brandon Shaw in every way. While he does partake in the experiment of killing David Kentley just for the thrill of getting away with it, he's dragged into more by Brandon and feels less of a desire or need to flaunt it in everyone's faces. He just wants to dispose of the body and be done with it once and for all. This of course would be the smart way to do it. Whether because of a lack of courage or his unwillingness to upset his `relationship' with Brandon, he doesn't. This adds further tension to his already guilt racked conscience, something Brandon sincerely lacks, leading him to take up heavy drinking and chain smoking to ease his troubled mind. Sadly these serve as tell-tale signs for a genius like Rupert to pick up on that something is amiss.
While seen only for the first few brief seconds of the picture after the opening credits, his presence is felt nonetheless throughout the entire film. Similar to how Janet Leigh's early demise in Psycho two decades later reverberated throughout the story, so does Hogan's, though certainly less memorably. The presence of his `coffin' in the middle of the room amidst the social get-together mirrors Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart for Phillip with the reemergence of the murder weapon, the rope with which David was strangled to death, adding only further burden to his guilt.
To this day Rope remains one of director Alfred Hitchcock's most enduring and innovative motion picture drama. It stands as his first film to be filmed entirely in Technicolor. Although he would on occasion revert back to black-and-white in cases of budgetary constraints, Psycho the most likely famous example of this, as well as his nostalgia for artistic value, it showed once more he could adapt his art with the changing times as easily or better then anyone else in the field. With the exception of the opening credits, Rope is shot on one solitary set located within a soundstage, much as though you were watching a play performed on stage in front of you. Regardless of the confined space the performances occupy, the atmospheric tension is nothing short of electrifying all the way to the very end. In addition, Hitchcock creates the illusion, with some success, of one continuous shot. In reality, however, the one-hundred and eight minute motion picture was broken down into ten segments each ranging in length from four y minutes to just over ten minutes. It is rather obvious to audiences today that whenever a performer or a piece of furniture is moved in way of the camera so that it covers up the entire screen that it is Hitchcock's way of covering up splits in the film segments. Nonetheless, it proved at least a reasonably effective film technique that he used once more in filming Under Capricorn for Transatlantic Pictures.
It is hard, then as it is today, not to pick up on the homosexual overtones of Rope. The closeness and quasi-intimacy Brandon and Phillip share together especially early on after they have killed David and stuffed his body inside the trunk suggest they are sharing a sexual liaison with one another. Brandon however can be viewed more as bi-sexual in nature as dialogue from him suggests that he had a short-lived relationship with David's current girlfriend and soon to be fiancye, Janet Walker. In an ironic bit of taste, director Alfred Hitchcock cast John Dall and Farley Granger, both homosexuals, to play the roles of two gay students. Original choices were Cary Grant, long rumored to be bi-sexual, as Rupert and Montgomery Clift who after accepting the role backed out of the picture out of fear of being exposed as a homosexual. It is unknown whether James Stewart who replaced Grant as Rupert knew of the homoerotic overtones of his character or the film in general. However, any suggestion that Rupert is a homosexual is lost in Stewart's performance. In addition, screenwriter Arthur Laurents was gay and in his published memoirs admitted to having a sexual relationship with actor Farley Granger. Much of the homoerotic dialogue and choreography of Patrick Hamilton's original play were cut from the final print of the film but Hitchcock however was able to keep the suggestion in the minds of audiences with the memories of Leopold and Loeb still fresh in their minds.
 "Nobody commits a murder just for the experiment of committing it, nobody except us." January 17, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Nobody commits a murder just for the experiment of committing it, nobody except us." So begins this film, really a stage play, brought to the screen by Hitchcock. Meet Phillip (ably played by Farley Granger) & Brandon (John Dall), a man who later declares in conversation that "I'd hang all the incompetents and fools anyway. They're far too many in the world." These are our murderers, two spolied prep boys, "men of such intellectual and cultural superiority that they are above the traditional moral concepts." As Brandon explains to his guests over drinks, "Good & evil, right & wrong were invented for the ordinary average man, the inferior man, because he needs them." Mind you (and I'm not giving anything away here, as it takes place in the first few minutes of the film) all this conversation takes place not 10 feet from their victim's body lying dead in a serving chest. That, in a nutshell (so to speak) is what this film is all about. In short, it's a macabre---one (bad) joke---story that just drags you along for an hour or so; as you are begged to wonder what is going to happen. Will the victim's father (one of half a dozen guests at this drinks party) discover his son's body? Will his girlfriend (as she tries to make idle awkward conversation with her former flame, a surprise guest---the victim's best friend)? Other players on hand include Jimmy Stewart as the prep boys' former professor, an aunt of the victim, and a housekeeper---who wanders around opening lots of things, trying to rachet up the suspense of this film. Unfortunately, the ending is not nearly as dramatic as your imagination might suggest. The last 20 minutes thus builds and builds---thanks to Jimmy Stewart really ( who calls the party "peculiar" early on), but also to Mr. Granger's sweating (once Stewart begins badgering him), and then it's over in an uneventful flash. John Dall plays the cool calculating murderer, so along with Granger we get treated to aspects of the typical dual personality of a murderer, but in this film it's just split into two bodies. That and the proximity of the victim's body to all the associated guests are the only interesting things about this play, actually. Unfortunately, making it into a film seems to have hindered it or at least added nothing to it. If you are a huge Hitchcock or Stewart fan (as I am) you might be interested in this film just out of curiosity, so consider renting it perhaps. Others may be better off watching "Vertigo" (for Hitch/Stewart's best teaming), "Strangers on a Train" (for Hitch/Granger's best pairing, or even "Dial M for Murder" (another play brought to the screen by Hitchcock that works much better than this offering). Cheers!
Skepiticism speaks moral November 26, 2005
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Rope, you can call that it is a great Hitchcock's experiment, or you may call that it is a nice play-like-movie inspired by Leopold & Loeb case.
The most interesting and important character in the movie is a professor Rupert played by James Stewart. His position is like on a borderline. At the first appearance he seems not to believe anything in the world. He doubts and laughs everything, especially common sense. Then he tends to make ordinary people uncomfortable. That makes Brandon believe Rupert is his side, supper human's, as Brandon describes, side.
A theme of this play is a moral. It is very unusual and also effective to show this kind theme through a character like Rupert. Let's say Mr. Skepiticism speaks moral.
I wonder how many people are attracted by such moral story nowadays. People, including myself, are more likely attracted by unhealthy, king and slave relationship between two wealthy, smart and good-looking young men and how they plan and commit the crime, and the shocking end of their relationship (one of them, Loeb, Brandon in the movie, was killed in a prison).
The other thing in the movie fascinates me is music by Poulenc, a French composer. Actually that is the most fascinates me. And I tried to find out what title of the music, that is Perpetual Movement No. 1. I love it. That scene, While Phillip plays the music, he is so afraid of the crime but trys to hide, and Ruppert asks questions and closes to him, lighting on and off, you can see the brilliant tension between the two characters with sensitive music.
Love the stage play exposition of this tight thriller October 28, 2005
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
My favorite Hitchcock, with Notorious being excellent as well.
I was always so drawn into the story through the long shots
and simplicity of the one apartment setting. Doing more with less is always a sign of artistic excellence, and I love this sparse, taut story (although the philosophy is a bit ho hum by today's standards, never mind that). Great mix of characters and personalities.
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