This afternoon, we watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope.

It is a movie of interest primarily because of Hitchcock’s use of what seems like one long camera shot, keeping the scenes seamlessly tied together, like one long rope, and the subtle homosexuality of the main characters (interesting discussion here), and the way it was rather loosely based on an infamous 1924 murder. The Leopold-Loeb crime and sentencing (the duo pled guilty) is covered well here (main trial page here — and the fasinating home page for this site about famous trials can be found here.

There’s plenty of intellectual meet in both the historical crime and the movie, touching as they do on the thinking of Frederick Nietzsche and his “super man” notions. Also, the ideas of determinism and the criminal made victim (as Clarence Darrow did in arguing that the teens should be spared the death penalty).

As a pieceo of entertainment, Rope gets maybe three stars. There is some fine acting, especially from Jimmy Stewart, but the plot moves slowly and lacks the same degree of tension of Hitchcock’s best thrillers.