I've been naughty.
I've been neglecting my 'to watch' DVD pile in favour of roaming the post-apocalyptic wastes via the XBox in "Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition".
But a few days of constant pain in my arm (old you know....so damn old) has forced me to stop twiddling knobs and finally get around to watching a film....So I chose.................
"Rope"
Two intellectually warped young men strangle a colleague, just before holding a party for the dead man's family and friends, and hide the body in a chest in the middle of the room.
Also on the guest list is their old University Professor with a sharp eye and a sharp brain....
Famously an exercise in technicality where the illusion that (almost) all a film was shot in one long take was tried out on Joe Public.
But it never really works.
Much of the 'Stage Play/One-Take' set-up serves no purpose either artistically or dramatically and often the hidden 'breaks' in this one-take illusion are glaringly and jarringly clumsy.
When Hitchcock's roaming camera first zooms in on a guy's back to hide the cut it works fine. But repeat it 2 or 3 times more and it becomes annoying and sticks out painfully, surely even for 40's audiences.
It seems Hitch was trying something for Joe Public who may have not seen the obvious, but any cineaste would.
And (although not the film's fault) time and technique has moved on and as such these trite little tricks simply don't fool a modern audience.
So, literally, all we are left with now are 4 or so pointless and clumsy zooms into a character's back.
This is made even more bizarre in the fact that, despite all this 'hiding' of the cuts, Hitchcock makes two other clear and open cuts during the film in two scenes (one cut to Stewart the other to the maid) which make you wonder why he wobbled into the backs of people's jackets to hide the others anyway!
The film also lacks that vital Homosexual aspect to make the storyline really take hold.
Hints (like when the maid says
"they got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning") are dropped here and there that the two lead murderers (Farley Granger and John Dall, based on the real Leopold-Loeb murders) are indulging in one of those achingly pretentious romps through intellectual Homosexuality, but it's perhaps too subtle (must have been even more obscure for general Joe Public in 1948) and this is made worse by the fact that James Stewart, as their old university Professor, really should be Homosexual too and have this link with the killers.
But hey, it's James Stewart!
You could not have picked a more cleaner cut, family friendly, populist actor (utterly wonderful though he was) for such a role. As such that Homosexual link, and thus perhaps even a University affair, with the killers is simply not there.
Edges are being crucially blunted.
Interestingly, according to the DVD interview with the writer, the actual seeing of the murder in the opening seconds, was a later addition by Hitchcock.
The writer had it so we never see the murder so that we are never actually sure if there even has been a murder, let alone if a body is hidden in plain sight in the room.
This would have changed the dynamic of the film massively, but it would have again added another layer to the plot and make for a bigger reveal at the end.
What you would have lost though, without this certainty, is the wonderful black humour and crucial sadistic games that are played (both visual and verbal) with the fact that there is indeed a body whose 'coffin' is being used to serve food from (to the corpse's Father no less) and that the sly remarks about the dead character being late are indeed in the worst of taste.
Things that keep the rest of the film actually interesting and entertaining even if a crucial edge of tension is lost because of it.
As far as acting goes everyone does well with John Dall really standing out. Granger though (whose career would gleefully slide down hill into astonishingly exploitative Euro shockers like
"So Sweet, So Dead" and full-on gore violence like
"The Prowler") seems to push it all too much.
His character is simply too unwound and uncertain to have ever actually committed the murder. That his character is a coward as far as getting caught goes is just fine if it does not get highlighted too strongly, here though it is. He also often shows a really out of place moral repugnance to the crime...Self-serving cowardice yes, but morality from someone who planned and carried out a thrill-kill murder? it does not wash.
Stewart is as watchable as always, but he seems ot be strangley mugging for the camera during his early scenes. Sometimes literally so as there are at least two occasions where he nervously glancers at and off camera.
The screenplay also seems to want to have its cake and eat it.
The shockingly explicit, uber-fascist and chillingly cold-blooded, intellectual reasoning used by the murderers for committing the crime, and for indeed not seeing it as a crime, are a kind of (only 3 years after the War) Nazi wet dream rhetoric which must have been quite strong and brutally realistic at, and for, that time.
And that such thoughts have been put into (the admittedly damaged already) minds of the killers by their Professor, played of course by Stewart, opens up some very dark and deep waters indeed.
And let us not beat around the bush here, Stewarts' views are indeed twisted and explicit and phrases along the lines of 'intellectuals and superiors have every right to commit murder' and that how 'they are the only ones really suitable to murder another 'inferior' are clear and precise.
And this is James Stewart (WW2 hero as well as clean-cut actor) saying these things, and these things have indeed been the reasoning for an actual murder.
But then we have some shoe-horned in preaching from Stewart to clear his character of any true blame, when the film has him state that the killers have 'twisted' his words and that they took them to a level that was never meant to be (step right up the same excuse used today by any and all apologists for religious crimes).
And although Stewart does take the blame for expressing beliefs that he now sees could indeed have been twisted into this crime...the film simply ignores the basic fact that his teachings never needed any twisting at all, or that they were in any way obscure or open to any other interpretation (step right up again the same excuse used today by any and all apologists for religious crimes).
The screenplay makes Stewart explicit in his words, and thus explicit in his part on the murder, but then decides to change its mind.
But this part never stands up and just seems to be there (although it may have been in the script/original play already) because James stewart could not be seen as that malignant a character.
We have some positives though.
The famous 'outside in the city' set view from the apartment window is well done and is very clever as it literally goes from afternoon to night before our eyes as lights comes on and clouds move.
The support cast is great (nice work from, a rather old looking, Sir Cedric Hardwick as the victim's Father and Edith Evanson as the maid) and some of the interplay and especially the twisted humour is wonderful in that Hitchcock way with playing with the most macabre of events.
The whole chest with a body in it set-up is expertly used by Hitchcock, though again I think for more as a black joke than for really effective dramatic reasons because we know the body will not be found yet, no matter how many sequences of the chest nearly getting opened we have.
The pace is okay (though slowed by the one-take deal) and some nice atmosphere is built up in the apartment set as well as all these (damn fine to adequate) actors play around with the macabre set-up.
But the film still comes off as Hitch using other people's money to play around in his cinematic sandpit, and with much of the essential dramatic edges honed-down there is only the black humour and macabre trickery left to truly entertain us.
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Originally Posted by DeadAlive  The Ungodly (AKA Perfect Witness). - Not the most original film of this genre. Desperately slow for the most part but well acted. A time filler only. |
Yeah, I picked this up sight unseen on R1 a while back.
A well done, very indy, horror-thriller with some good performances.
Agreed it's slow and low key but has some effective moments...especially in the hospital scene.