Homosexuality In The Film Rope

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Alfred Hitchcock is the master of cinematic innovation and suspense. With every film he directed, he focused on different technical challenges – from shooting an entire film within one room (Rear Window), nearly killing a man with an airplane (North by Northwest), and depicting a brutal murder without seeing the stabbing on screen (Psycho). With Rope, the film was revolutionary on multiple fronts – from its technical achievement of the one shot and the subtle depiction of homosexuality and other controversial content. The1948 film Rope is about two homosexual young men who think they can commit the perfect crime, and hold a party afterwards with the victim’s body hidden in the room. The men invite family and friends of the victim, as well as a former housemaster of theirs because one of the men thinks their housemaster will appreciate their “perfect murder.” The film, from murder through the party and afterwards, all happens in real time in what appears to be nearly one continuous shot. Through the use of the “one shot,” Hitchcock capitalizes on visual storytelling and off-screen dialogue to depict the subtext of a scene, revealing the truth of characters’ relationships. Thus, the subtle depiction of “the controversial …show more content…

Hitchcock known for the unsettling nature of film used homosexuality, which was extremely taboo for the time as a tool for this. Hitchcock previously with the film Psycho depicted murder off-screen and was able to work around the Motion Picture Production Code, which was responsible for censorship of film at the time. Working around the Motion Picture Production Code in regards to homosexuality was done with the heavily implied intimate relationship of the two main characters; this was only possible with the intimate use of the

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