New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie Oleson" data-source="post: 411503" data-attributes="member: 8">This hasn't been implemented by Dutch Prime yet, but I guess it's only a matter of time, and that will be the time I'll cancel my subscription (although the ads may not appear in rentals which is 70% of the films I watch on Prime).It's annoying enough that it happens on youtube but at least that doesn't cost me anything.ROPE (1948)[ATTACH=full]54611[/ATTACH]Yes, I tried another Hitchcock film even though at this point I suspect nothing's ever going to match is four super-films: The Birds, Notorious, Rebecca and Psycho.I was aware of ROPE's gay undertones, and without a particular context a lot of that first dialogue could indeed suggest a secret of the forbidden love.I feel the real "kink" starts with hosting a dinner party literally on top of their very dark secret, it's something that borders on sexual exhibitionism, the excitement of getting caught.But this part of the story is somewhat undermined by an equally strong angle: the feeling of superiority and the right to determine the significance of the lives of other people.It doesn't ruin the story, it's just that it doesn't always look as interesting as it could have been.Performance-wise, my favourite is Joan Chandler as Janet who balances her act between uptight and adorably self-reflective.The story is predictable enough, I don't think anyone actually expected them to get away with it, and this is further confirmed by the insecure behaviour displayed by one of the murderers.Of course the biggest contrivance, the badly used MacGuffin, is David Kentley's hat. It happens somewhere in the second half of the story and this implies that the original set-up of the perfect murder had never been sustainable. It comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with the party and the characters hovering around the body in the trunk.Speaking of which, the macabre aspect thereof is very effective especially because it's so easy to forget about it for a while. The recurring "sudden" realisastions that they're eating food that is displayed on top of the corpse of a loved one is wickedly sick.After the film had ended it took a me a little while to understand that the solution to the murder mystery wasn't the main goal, hat or no hat. As I said, that comeuppance seemed almost self-explanatory from the very beginning.The real  comeuppance belongs to James Stewart's character Rupert Cadell who had always explained his murder-can-be-useful theory in such a smug and quasi-intellectual way.Of course it was obvious that it was all "talk" but that never stopped him from talking about it, and apparently that goes back to the university years of these characters.I'm not saying that he's to blame for what happened, it's the confrontation of his fancy and ignorant theory becoming reality, and his desperate ways to distance himself from it. He thought he was so clever, but he never thought about what  he was saying beyond his own  feelings of superior intellect.Therefore I still think he's the villain of the piece, similar to Maggie Smith's character in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie.Hitchcock ranked (so far):The BirdsNotoriousRebeccaPsychoThe Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)RopeSuspicionShadow Of A DoubtVertigoStrangers On A Train(Frenzy, I don't remember enough to rank it)</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =