athousandwinds | Thoughts on Rope (1948)

Last night I watched Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and, not done with it yet, this morning I listened to the 1983 BBC radio version of the original 1929 play. The differences between the two are fascinating.

They both follow the same basic plot, opening on the murder of a young man by two of his friends, who then hide the body in a chest in their living room, waiting until after a party they’re throwing to dump the body in a lake. The story takes place more or less in real time: we follow them throughout the party, which includes both the victim’s father and a kindred spirit of theirs, Rupert Cadell. One of the murderers is unrepentant, the other coming undone with fear and guilt.

As much as anything else, it’s an exercise in how different two works can be while sharing identical plots and a good chunk of dialogue.

There are the obvious differences, of course. The Hays Code ensures that the relationship between Brandon and Phillip in the film is only implicit, whereas Brandon and Granno (the Phillip equivalent) in the play are intended to be lovers, and Rupert Cadell is also implied to be gay. Arthur Laurents, the screenwriter, also tightened up the interactions between the guests: the original play had two extraneous guests, Leila and Kenneth, whose role was to represent, in Brandon’s mind, ordinary humanity. In the film, they still represent ordinary humanity, but rather than being strangers they are the victim’s fiancée and former best friend, and have their own little subplot.

But the most significant change is in the setting. Rope the play is very specifically set in late 1920s London, but Rope the film is set in late 1940s New York; that is to say, post-World War II. This gives the story’s moral argument a heavier weight. When Jimmy Stewart’s Rupert demands to know, “By what right do you dare to say that there's a superior few to which you belong?” we know exactly what he means by it. In an earlier debate about Nietzsche’s superman, Hitler is brought up as an immediate rebuttal to Brandon’s posturing; his edgy “they should hang Nazis first of all for being stupid” does nothing to defuse the tension in the room.

The play by contrast is set after a completely different war. While references to Nietzsche still abound, their refutation is less important and the focus is much more on the two-facedness of British society between the wars. There is no equivalent line to Jimmy Stewart’s “By what right…?” Instead there is only Cadell’s “very queer, dark and incomprehensible universe”, where killers may well be brought to the Old Bailey, but are unlikely to be brought to justice – one way or another.

There is a marked difference between Jimmy Stewart’s supercilious intellectual Second World War vet and Alan Rickman’s supercilious intellectual First World War vet. (Rickman plays Cadell in the 1983 BBC version.) Stewart’s Cadell is the picture of a sneering elitist: when he makes his rousing defence of murder, he tells his shocked audience to think of the problems it would solve: “Unemployment…poverty…waiting in line for theatre tickets…” We know he was a soldier and he walks with a slight limp, but otherwise his experience of war is barely touched upon. He is primarily cast in the role of a teacher, with Brandon and Phillip his eager disciples.

Rickman’s Cadell, on the other hand, is a Siegfried Sassoon type: a poet and aesthete intensely embittered by the brutality of war. His defence of murder, however, is not in the least aesthetic (unlike Stewart’s Cadell, who believes that “murder is – or should be – an artform”), but founded in the cynical observation that no petty one-on-one sandbagging in an alleyway, looked upon with disgust by the world, could possibly match the feted mass slaughter of one nation’s youth by another for sheer bloody horror.

In fact, where Stewart’s Cadell comes across as a smug poseur, delighting in shocking his bourgeois companions, Rickman’s Cadell seems profoundly depressed, more nihilistic than Nietzschean. After a rambling speech in which he describes the grey misery of a particular hour of the night, Brandon asks him, “You see no earthly object in living?...Why don’t you get interested in things?” Rupert responds with a shrug.

Ultimately both Cadells end by discovering the murder committed by Brandon and Phillip/Granno and rejecting Brandon’s claim to superiority, though Stewart’s version clunks a bit harder – whether this is due to censorship or the need to give Jimmy Stewart a lengthy moralising speech I don’t know. In a film which otherwise denies that anyone is inherently superior to anyone else, they felt the need to have Stewart’s Cadell declare, “There must have been something deep inside you from the very start that let you do this thing, just as there was something inside me that kept me from doing it.”

Rickman’s Cadell makes no such claims to moral superiority. He admits he’s not a man of morals, that he holds life cheap, and that Old Bailey justice isn’t justice. All those things are true. And yet someone is dead who didn’t have to be dead, a dozen lives have been destroyed who didn’t have to be, and all for the sake of someone’s cruel sense of humour. What other remedy is there?

On the whole, I think Rope the film is the better work. The dialogue is sharper, the tension is more expertly raised and lowered, and the characters of Brandon and Phillip are more compelling than Brandon and Granno, who only aren’t Bullingdon Club boys because they went to Oxford. But Stewart himself felt that he was miscast as Cadell, his image at the time perhaps too clean for the character’s murkiness. The film, with its altered setting and altered Cadell, is excellent despite that, but I do hope that post-pandemic I have the chance to watch the original play – it seems right up my street.