Alfred Hitchcock (1948)

The Patrick Hamilton play, set in Mayfair, is inspired by the Leopold and Loeb murder, which took place in Chicago in 1924.  In Hume Cronyn’s treatment for Hitchcock’s film, for which Arthur Laurents wrote the screenplay, the story moves back across the Atlantic, to New York, and the setting is contemporary.  Hitler is mentioned as a thing of the past and there are tedious jokey references to Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, James Mason and (I guess) even to some other Hitchcock movies of the forties.   It’s not much of an adaptation:  Rope’s theatre origins are creakily evident, and there’s acting to match – the kind of acting which, because the mechanics of it are so apparent, can be uncomfortable to watch even from the front rows of theatre stalls and which, on screen, is terrible.   This fussy, hollow lack of subtlety is especially evident in John Dall’s portrait of Brandon Shaw, the nerveless prime mover in the murder that we see accomplished in the film’s first shot, as Brandon and his neurotic junior partner-in-crime, Phillip Morgan, strangle a former classmate called David Kentley.  This may be a bit unfair on Dall:  perhaps his by-the-book, obvious performance is conspicuously bad largely because Farley Granger, as Phillip, is so vapid.  The coarse acting competition among the supporting roles is keen too:  contenders include Joan Chandler as the murderee’s fiancée, Constance Collier as his palm-reading aunt, and Edith Evanson as Brandon and Phillip’s housekeeper.   You sometimes wonder if Hitchcock cast mediocre actors because they’d be less likely to distract attention from his own resource and inventiveness.

Brandon and Phillip put David’s body in a big wooden chest, cover it with a tablecloth and candlesticks and serve food and drink from the coffin-top, at a party where the guests include the dead man’s father (Cedric Hardwicke).  As usual, Hitchcock is determined to amuse himself, even though the running joke of the stage play – that the object containing the corpse stays in view throughout – doesn’t naturally lend itself to a moving picture.  Hitchcock decided to emphasise the constraints of the material.  His famous experiment here with very few, very long takes, continuously panning from one performer to another, has the effect of throwing into relief the stagy acting and the ping-pong of stage dialogue.  The most amusing camera movements occur in long shots of characters receding from the room where the main action takes place to the kitchen:  the housekeeper’s to and fro, as she clears the top of the chest at the end of the party, is particularly enjoyable.  The huge cyclorama of a New York City skyline is entertaining too – to quote Wikipedia:

‘It included models of the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings. Numerous chimneys smoke, lights come on in buildings, neon signs light up, and the sunset slowly unfolds as the movie progressed. At about one hour into the film, a red neon sign in the far background showing Hitchcock’s profile with “Reduco” – the fictitious weight loss product used in his Lifeboat (1944) came – is visible for just a moment. Within the course of the film, the clouds – made of spun glass -change position and shape a total of eight times.’

(Needless to say, I missed Hitchcock’s appearance.)  There’s the odd detail that makes the director look careless, however.  At one point, Phillip is suppressing his anguish so furiously that he breaks the glass he’s holding and cuts his hand badly.  It has healed completely by the time the aunt reads his palm a couple of screen minutes later.

It’s apparently a matter of argument as to whether the Chicago University students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had a homosexual relationship but the camp, bitchy flavour of much of the writing in Rope and the mannerisms of John Dall in particular make it hard, Production Code notwithstanding, to see Brandon and Phillip as anything other than gay.   Leopold and Loeb – whose victim, Bobby Franks, was only fourteen years old – wanted to commit the perfect crime.  Brandon Shaw is motivated by the intellectual challenge of murdering David Kentley – by the thrill of confirming, through killing David, his and Phillip’s superiority to their victim.  (Everyone else in the story seems to adore David:  it’s not clear whether Brandon is envious or simply despises David or wants him for himself.)  There’s talk of the Ubermensch and so on but I didn’t understand either why Brandon was so pleased by the cleverness of what he and Phillip had done or what made him see it as a perfect murder.  (There seems a fair chance of things going wrong – for example, it’s only because the traffic’s bad that the housekeeper doesn’t arrive back at the apartment earlier.)  The most sadistically remarkable aspect of the crime is the killers’ invitation to David Kentley’s parents to spend a social evening in the company of their son’s corpse.

We’re given to understand that Brandon got his Nietzschean ideas from his and Phillip’s former schoolmaster, Rupert Cadell.   When James Stewart as Rupert first arrives at the party, it’s briefly invigorating – the arch lines, when Stewart is speaking them, sound witty and unforced.   But Hitchcock photographs him too soon and too often registering, quietly but tellingly, what Brandon and Phillip have been up to.  Besides, James Stewart isn’t convincing as someone who would propound the subversive, egomaniac philosophy that triggers the crime, even allowing for the fact that Rupert’s theories have been perverted by the psychopathic Brandon.   The casting of Stewart may have been intended to mute the gay textures of the material and is, to that extent, effective – but someone like George Sanders would have been more comfortable spouting Rupert’s sub-Wildean epigrams.

10 July 2010