Volume 11 - Rope and the Privilege of Murder

When you're having an Alfred Hitchcock Month!, as we currently are, there are certain topics you have to bring up. Women, suspense, mystery, and humor are certainly among them. But, in most situations, you can't talk about Hitchcock without talking about murder. I haven't done the math on this topic, but I think it's entirely possible that all of Alfred Hitchcock's films have some kind of murder going on, even if sometimes it's a murder of crows. (We'll get to that one of these weeks, I promise.)

While more than a handful of Hitchcock's films are built around a murder, there's one particular Hitchcock film that stands out because the entire film is devoted to a bunch of people, in one room, where a murder has just happened. It's not a mystery who did the killing, and why the murder happened is spelled out pretty neatly for us early on. If you're thinking that this doesn't seem like the formula for a Hitchcock thriller, you're right. And that's one reason why the film we're about to talk about stands out as one of the director's most interesting projects.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Rope

1948, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

If Hitchcock's films were a line of toys, Rope is one of the ones that would have been sent to the island of misfit toys. It has a lot of the things we often expect from his films - murder, intrigue, a marvelous James Stewart performance - but it's certainly his most contained film. I don't mean that in regard to its themes, I mean that the action is literally contained in one room. Even Rear Window spends more time outside than this one does, and that's the movie where Mr. Stewart is confined to a wheelchair.

Rope opens in a dark New York City apartment with the murder of David Kentley, strangled to death with a length of rope by two of his college classmates, Brandon and Phillip. The two killers aren't the type of characters you'd expect to find as the killers in an Alfred Hitchcock film, they're simply two Harvard educated guys who thought murder could be an art. They're also obviously gay lovers, though the film never mentions this, which is one more reason Rope felt like such an outlier when it was released in 1948. Several theaters banned the film, not because of the murder, but because of the implied homosexuality.

Brandon and Phillip become the focal point of the film from the first frame, and they're two of Hitchcock's most vibrant characters, but for very different reasons. Brandon, played by John Dall, is smug and confident, laughing off the murder because it was so perfect.

"Nobody commits a murder just for the experiment of committing it. Nobody except us."

Brandon's glee is countered by Phillip, played by Farley Granger, who immediately regrets the couple's decision and begins to assume the worst. Phillip has a good reason to be concerned, because the second part of their plan involves hosting a dinner that night, in the apartment, with David's body resting as peacefully as possible in the chest from which dinner will be served. The guests for this dinner party include David's parents, David's girlfriend, another classmate, and Rupert Cadell (Stewart), the headmaster from school who gave Brandon the idea that murder could be justified in the right situation.

If this one-setting dinner party sounds like a stage play, that's because it originally was. And Hitchcock, eager to experiment while making his first color film, worked meticulously to frame the film as a play. Running at almost real time - there's a little bit of speeding up time during the evening to keep the film at a crisp 80 minutes - Hitchcock managed to shoot the film in a series of 4-10 minute takes, concealing the cuts as well as possible to make it appear that the camera never stops rolling inside the apartment.

Much like the camera, the conversation at the dinner party never seems to stop either. Brandon and Phillip allow their guests some time to talk about simple things, like books and movies - including a humorous sequence where Stewart attempts to talk about movie stars like James Mason and Cary Grant with the two female guests - but eventually the topic of murder finds its way into the conversation.

It's at this moment that Stewart gets to shine as only he can, preaching the idea that murder should be used for personal gain by certain enlightened individuals as the other guests in the room wonder if they should laugh at his idea or fear him. Brandon, still riding the high of finally testing this theory, leaps at the opportunity to guide the discussion, and his back and forth with Rupert leads the conversation to a rather abrupt end when David's father - who still expects his son to show up at this party - becomes shocked by the implications of it.

"Who is to decide if a human being is inferior, and therefore a suitable victim for murder?"

Brandon backs away from saying too much at this point, but he continues to push the envelope as the night goes on, particularly when he brings the rope that was used as a murder weapon back into the film. The viewer knows that he's taunting the guests and especially focused on Rupert, who he obviously respects and may even have feelings for (the original play implies that Rupert also had homosexual relations with one of the killers, but this is muted in the film). Brandon is kind of an ancestor to those overly talkative villains we're used to seeing in super hero and James Bond films, seemingly wanting not only to get away with a crime but have his crime understood by the people who could stop him. Dall shines as he does this, and Hitchcock's choice to pair him and Stewart against Granger's crescendo into drunken anger throughout the evening creates a intriguing game of cat and mouse as we watch to see if Brandon and Phillip's perfect plan will go off as they intended.

It's sad that the controversy that was most notable about the film upon release was its homosexual overtones, because the philosophical debate about murder and where it can rank on the scale of right and wrong is really the most interesting thing about Rope. There aren't a lot of films - especially films from the 1940s - that are willing to sit on the screen and debate whether or not murder is a good idea or not. It wasn't a comfortable topic then - Stewart even said after the fact that he wished he hadn't made the film - but today it still feels like one of the most fresh topics in any Hitchcock film. The script handles the debate expertly - even though it clearly guides us to understand the wrong in Brandon and Phillip's action - and Stewart's work in the final sequence is among the best he ever did. If you know anything about James Stewart (I think he's the greatest actor that's ever lived, but that's a debate for another day), that's a big accomplishment.

The problem with Rope - that's a very good problem to have - is that it's that misfit in both Hitchcock's filmography and in cinematic history. There are not enough films like this; films that are willing to challenge the viewer to think differently about macabre topics. Which made finding a double feature partner for Rope one of the more difficult decisions I've made since I started the Double Feature Picture Show. Here are a few of the things I considered:

• Murder is the centerpiece of Rope, and murder needs to be a topic of debate in the film we're pairing it with. But we don't want a movie that's just about murder for the sake of murder, we need something that focuses on not just why the murder is happening but why the murder matters in the film's world.
• As I've already said, Rope makes it pretty clear that we shouldn't sympathize with its killers, even though poor Phillip really does seem like he knows from minute one that he's made a huge mistake. Despite that, Rope still tries to keep us thinking about whether or not the murder could be justified. That's a theme that not a lot of movies are willing to attempt, so I want something that follows that lead.
• I thought long and hard about the real time(ish) and one-setting aspects of Rope, but they don't really work with a lot of films. I love the technical gimmicks at the center of Rope, but I'm willing to abandon them in favor of a film that manages to convey some of the same themes.
• The idea of murder as an "art" that only the gifted should be able to perform is a common theme in a lot of movies - especially when it comes to serial killers and sociopaths - but it's the romantic attachment to that art that Brandon shows throughout Rope that really sells this film's approach toward justified murder.

And it's that last point, where I started thinking about characters in film who murdered because they believed they had the right to do so, that led me to a film that's very different than Rope, but very committed to the same idea that some murders...well, they just have to happen.

Frailty

2001, Directed by Bill Paxton

Rope took us into the minds of two murderers, one giddy about the opportunity he has been given and one repentful. Frailty, the 2001 directorial debut by legendary character actor Bill Paxton, also gives us multiple murderers who have varying levels of commitment to the actions they are a part of. Like Rope, the motivation for these actions is clearly vocalized by one character, but the reasons for killing, the amount of killing, and the actions of the killer are all handled very differently in this religion-based horror feature.

Matthew McConaughey - in that awkward phase between his early career success and his rise to Oscar status in the 2010s - stars alongside Paxton, playing the adult version of Fenton Meiks, a man who walks into an FBI office late one night to tell an FBI agent (Powers Boothe, an acceptable substitute for the late James Stewart) the story of how his father and recently-deceased brother lived as "The God's Hand Killer" in a rural part of Texas. 

As a cold and beaten down Fenton relays his tale to the agent, we spend most of the film in flashbacks to his childhood, where Fenton and his brother Adam watch their father (Paxton) change from a simple life as a mechanic to a motivated serial killer who wants his boys to help with a series of murders. Why on earth does this man decide he needs to kill a list of people who he's never met? 

Because he was chosen by God to dispose of people who aren't people. They're demons.

Dad (his name is never spoken by his children, so that's all we have to go with) spends a lot of the movie explaining what is going on to his sons, and most of the film' s drama comes as young Fenton (Matt O'Leary) struggles with the fact that his father and younger brother (Jeremy Sumpter) believe that they are serving God by murdering people they've never met before. The two child actors do a fine job and carry most of the film, while Paxton manages to make Dad a brutal man who is surprisingly tender and straightforward with his sons.

Things start to get weird as Frailty goes on, because some of Dad's predictions are incredibly accurate. Adult Fenton explains this away to the FBI agent by saying "Sometimes, the truth defies reason," and that's about the best explanation we can get for why the father and sons seem to be able to carry out kidnappings and murders with little to no resistance. Dad and the young Adam are convinced that God is protecting the family and sending them everything they need to complete their crimes - including a now iconic axe with the name Otis carved into it - and one of the coolest things about Frailty is how it manages to sell this concept to the viewer.

Rope was a film about two killers with very little room for error, but Frailty flips that concept on its edge as everything just seems to go right for these killers. It's ridiculous to think that what this father is telling his sons is true, but Paxton and screenwriter Brent Hanley (who has, shockingly, never written another feature) do a wonderful job of keeping us guessing as the film goes on. I might have said too much about the plot already - seeing this with no knowledge of what it was about back when it played in theaters is still one of the great shockers of my cinematic life - but even if you haven't seen it and you're starting to make guesses about the film as I write this, I'm willing to bet you'll probably be wrong.

Frailty and Rope are both movies that are best experienced by open minded viewers who know little about them and are ready to get philosophical. This means that I've possibly made viewing them less enjoyable by talking as much as I have so far - way to go, Michael - but I'm pretty excited by just how unique this pair of films are together. One film is about murder that's justified by intellect or class, and the other is about murder that's justified by dedication and belief. You could even re-title them as Liberal Murder Story and Conservative Murder Story, as these are obviously killers on two different ends of the spectrum in American society.

In Rope, Brandon explains away his indifference toward his action by saying "Good and evil, right and wrong were invented for the ordinary, average man - the inferior man - because he needs them." He might as well have been talking directly about Dad from Frailty, because there's no reason this man kills anyone without his belief in good and evil. This isn't a shock - religion has probably been the cause of more deaths than anything else - but it does perfectly explain the difference between why he's killing and why Dad is killing.

While introducing an episode of his own show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Master of Suspense once quipped "I think everyone enjoys a nice murder...provided he is not the victim." That's a nice way of reminding us that murder is going to happen and if you're on the receiving end it doesn't matter if a killer is Harvard educated or an auto mechanic. Both of these films spend very little time humanizing their victims - but we're not here to enjoy their work anyway. These are two films about getting away with murder and why murder can happen for reasons you might not expect. Hitchcock made enough money selling murder that he could confidently remind us that murder is a completely nonpartisan affair, and I think he'd appreciate the opposing approaches to killing that exist in these two films.

So, if you're ever feeling particularly morbid and want to sit down and see some people from different walks of life commit murders for some unique reasons, this might just be the double feature for you. I hope you don't get too morbid and too inspired by them, but if you do - just know that I also wouldn't enjoy being the victim.