"Rope" (1948)

The fame of Hitchcock's Rope begins with the perception that it was the first of its kind to attempt a film in one single take; of course, with the technology of the time, such a feat was still impossible, but Hitch does his best to streamline the cuts that had to be made to each (maximum) 10-minute long take (reels of the time could not go farther). The film nevertheless posits that its action is continuous and uninterrupted by time lapses. The action takes place in one single location, an apartment in New York, where two bachelors -- presumably gay lovers of a kind -- commit the murder of a colleague and hide the body right in the midst of a party they assemble at their pad that same night. The atrocity is enhanced by the killers' brazenness to hide the body in a large chest that serves as a makeshift dining table for the victim's parents, friends, and girlfriend. Essentially the film works on the suspense derived from the delayed discovery of the body. James Stewart enters the picture playing a crotchety university professor, a mentor of the killers, who gradually apprises himself of the murder. The central idea is taken from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, dealing with the notion that some men, judged by the greatness and refinement of their intellect, are naturally superior to other men, and therefore at liberty to dispose of inferior people for the sake of making a point of their superiority. Stewart's character, Rupert Cadell, chief promulgator of the skewed ubermensch law of ethics, brings about the climax with his discovery of the murder: whether he applauds his proteges, or condemns them, is the question that urges the suspense forward.

Rope is only 80 minutes long, and feels even shorter. It is, like some of Hitchcock's stage-bought scenarios, taken directly from a play by Patrick Hamilton; its story is essentially recyclable ad infinitum, but the film's prestige lies in how Hitchcock makes the material feel like an actual play occurring in a fixed time and place. Paradoxically, Rope is an instance of a dramatic form transcended by cinema -- that is, made cinematic -- through the very means it transcends. Hitchcock disappears the camera because he uses it unlike how a movie director would use it, with numerous cuts and stylized changes of perspective; rather, Hitchcock guides the camera-eye along the natural line of events as they unfold and move through a unified space; the cuts, though noticeable, are made discreetly, in good faith with the novelty. The film is, strangely, cinematic because it is so uncinematic (imagine for instance the difference in technique that Orson Welles would have employed if he adapted the same play). Conversely, the film is memorable as a novelty well-played, and not so much as one of overriding necessity, the type of film that is expressly a trope to be studied in film school.
...