How To Make It Better: Rope (1948)

Being a series in which I prescribe amendments to films in order to improve them.

Rope is a neat little thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based on a play by Patrick Hamilton. It stars James Stewart as the former teacher of two young men who decide to commit the perfect murder just to prove they can, causing Our Jimmy’s suspicions to be aroused during a dinner party his ex-students throw to put the seal on their achievement. It’s particularly notable for Hitchcock’s technical experiment, in which he creates the illusion of (almost) shooting the movie in one take — this was impossible in 1948, since cameras could only hold ten minutes of film, so Hitch stitched together multiple long takes to fake it.

How could Rope bet better?

In a Nutshell: Make It Ten Minutes Longer

Rope is super short even for a Forties flick — only eighty minutes. And if it were ninety minutes, it would be considerably improved.

Just to be clear, it wouldn’t be improved by simply slapping another ten minutes on, without concern for what those ten minutes actually involved. Rope would not be a better film with Jimmy Stewart chasing his students around the apartment in sped-up motion to “Yakety Sax”. Nor would it be better if in the middle of the film the entire cast simply sat in silence, staring at the camera, for ten minutes.

But what would improve the thing would be ten more minutes of the very crux of the story — the intellectual duel between…