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Rope (1948)
Rope is a 1948 American psychological crime thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, inspired by the 1929 play of the same title by Patrick Hamilton. The film was adapted by Hume Cronyn with a screenplay by Arthur Laurents.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock · Shot by Joseph A. Valentine, William V. Skall · Cut by William H. Ziegler · Music by David Buttolph · 80 min
How it was made
- Each take ran up to ten minutes, the maximum a camera magazine could hold, and the single set's walls were mounted on rollers so they could be silently wheeled out of the camera's path and back again, with prop men repositioning furniture between moves.
- Roughly half the film's cuts were disguised by panning or tracking into an object that filled the frame, such as the back of a man's jacket or a piece of furniture, so the join between takes would not be visible.
- The cyclorama backdrop was the largest ever built for a soundstage at the time, including models of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, chimneys that smoked, windows that lit up, and spun-glass clouds that changed shape eight times to track the film's slowly setting sun.
- Hitchcock reshot the final four or five reels because he was dissatisfied with the colour of the artificial sunset.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Alfred Hitchcock
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