One of Hitchcock’s many points of genius was his ability to turn new technical advances to dramatic and thematic purpose. As early as The Ring and The Lodger (both 1927) he fully deployed the armoury of expressionistic devices. When the advent of sound interrupted his production of Blackmail (1929) he found brilliant ways to use the sound, speech, noise, to dramatic effect. Remember the heroine’s exaggerated hearing of “knife!” over the breakfast table.
When reviewers cavilled at his obviously false backdrops in Marnie (1964), they must have forgotten his expressionist background and his commitment to theme. The alleged lapses in his craft were rather a representation of the heroine’s psychological disjunction, the gap between her present and her past, the neurosis caused by her buried trauma.
From his 3-D Dial M for Murder (1954), one most clearly remembers Grace Kelly’s urgent reach into the audience for help against her assailant — and her grasp of the fatal scissors. But there was a more characteristic effect in the opening scene. The mantelpiece in her apartment projects off the left side of the screen, the objects upon it hovering precariously over the audience. More than just thrust, Hitchcock used the 3-D to express the fragility of even those characters’ privileged lives.
And so to his first colour film, Rope (1948). Typically, Hitchcock did not deploy the technical advance just to enhance the record of reality but rather turned it to thematic purpose.
The pre-title shot is downward on a city street. The tone is predominantly grey, punctuated by a green canopy, a passing yellow cab, and in the image centre a pink with white apartment building.The fire hydrant is pink, the mailbox gray. Against that bland palette the title Rope erupts in red, followed by the cast and credits in bright white.
That colour scheme, a dominating blandness, represents the object of the two central characters’ arrogant and murderous disdain. It’s the world of the dull, whom the bright privileged two young men feel authorized to murder. They have black hair and wear dark suits — Brandon navy, Phillip brown — in contrast to the bald father’s light grey and grey Rupert’s dark grey tweed. Blond Ken wears light brown.
In his signature cameo, Hitchcock with a woman walks along the screen in the title sequence, shot from above, himself one of the “little people” at whom the sociopaths sneer. Here Hitchcock aligns himself with the generation of the victim’s father, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who takes personal affront at Brandon’s theory that the bright have the right to eliminate the dull.
The young men’s apartment continues that colour design. When the curtains are opened the cityscape outside is an uninflected grey. Because they are after all of that same world as the less valued, less brilliant, their apartment is furnished in light browns and greys. The chest that harbours their corpse is a dark brown, attuned to their colours. But the flowers are white. Even their art holds that pallor: the Milton Avery painting in the dining room, the black and white cubist piece in the living room, the monochrome heads. Their new painting by “an American primitive” is —on the contrary — a colourful abstraction, in the manner of Miro. Brandon’s misdescription parallels his performance of innocence about his missing friend.
When Rupert returns to confront his former students the city outside has turned to black night, with a scattering of red and green neon signs. The professor’s deduction process seems to probe that darkness around the chest.
When Rupert produces the rope with which the boys had strangled David, they crumble. Phillip knows the jig is up. At that point we get flashing green and red from the neon outside. The flashing light has two effects. It feels like a throbbing pulse against but heightening the tension, like the metronome Rupert turned on earlier when Phillip tried to hide his nerves by playing the piano. As well, the lights cast an aura of disease, of moral sickliness, over the revelation that Rupert’s philosophical theorizing prompted the men to kill their friend. The lights suggest how Phillip feels his teachings have been turned poisonous.
Of course there is another technical breakthrough in Rope. Hitchcock famously shot the film in the 10-minute segments allowed by a single film cartridge. That is, each scene represents a continuity, a steady flow in contrast to the master editor’s usual fast clip. And again, there is a thematic purpose to that strategy. The continuity in each scene’s shooting points to the central theme: the continuity by which an abstract theory can lead to an unfortunate consequence.
Rupert feels guilty himself when he learns that his words led to the murderers’ deeds. In his intellectual speculations Rupert contended “murder is - or should be - an art. Not one of the 'seven lively', perhaps, but an art nevertheless. And, as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals.” His defence of murder is playful: “Think of the problems it would solve: unemployment, poverty, standing in line for theatre tickets….”
But two of Rupert’s students take his theorizing literally. “The good Americans usually die young on the battlefield, don't they? Well, the Davids of this world merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect murder. Course he, uh, he was a Harvard undergraduate. That might make it justifiable homicide.” So they kill their friend and play out their intellectual superiority by entertaining their victim’s father and girl-friend over his corpse.
The killers’ rationale horrifies their teacher. “By what right do you dare to say that there's a superior few to which you belong?” Our responsibility for our words and what they may lead to is one of Hitchcock’s most frightening exposures. That theme inheres in the 10-minute takes. At the end, appalled at learning g how his words led to terrible action, Rupert calls the police. Not by words, this time, but by action. He fires Phillip's revolver into the night -- the citizens below call the cops.
But then director Hitchcock was like publisher Rupert in addressing “people [who] not only can read but actually can think.”
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