ROPE
Who but Hitchcock could make a successful thriller about the amoral behavior of Leopold and Loeb while tying it in with the intellectual snobbery of the Nazi scientists we'd only recently brought over to the winning side? Who else could utilize unending shots that do not call attention to themselves? Who else could have cast Jimmy Stewart as a smarmy professor who must confront the logical extension of his own cavalier theories? Who else could have added touches of more than one Shakespearean tragedy? Who else would have staged a scene where a strangled youth is buried in a crate used as a coffee table upon which the dead boy's parents are invited to dine (Think Titus Andronicus)? Who else could make a film with a resolution that falls apart only because having suffered the two killers for the duration of the film we come to feel gypped by not seeing them suffer? Who? Not a living soul, that's who.
Who but Hitchcock could make a successful thriller about the amoral behavior of Leopold and Loeb while tying it in with the intellectual snobbery of the Nazi scientists we'd only recently brought over to the winning side? Who else could utilize unending shots that do not call attention to themselves? Who else could have cast Jimmy Stewart as a smarmy professor who must confront the logical extension of his own cavalier theories? Who else could have added touches of more than one Shakespearean tragedy? Who else would have staged a scene where a strangled youth is buried in a crate used as a coffee table upon which the dead boy's parents are invited to dine (Think Titus Andronicus)? Who else could make a film with a resolution that falls apart only because having suffered the two killers for the duration of the film we come to feel gypped by not seeing them suffer? Who? Not a living soul, that's who.
