Since today is Farley Granger's birthday, I thought I'd share one of my favorite Farley Granger movies. It's also one of my favorite Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock movies.
Rope was shot in long, up-to-ten-minute takes, and cleverly edited to give the appearance that everything happened in one single shot. Some of this was accomplished by putting some of the set pieces - including the walls - on wheels, so that crews could roll them out of the way of the moving camera and then roll them back in time for them to be in the shot. This also meant that if somebody flubbed a line at minute nine, they had to do it all over again. It must have been a pretty arduous process, but it achieves a chilling effect.
Rope is based on a stage play itself inspired by the real-life case of Leopold and Loeb, two brilliant but disturbed young men who committed murder in an attempt to pull off "the perfect crime" and who held the belief that the notion of the Nietzche "Superman" made them above the law.
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