Two young men attempt to prove they committed the perfect murder by hosting a dinner party for the family of a classmate they just strangled to death.
Rated 4.7 / 5 from 3 logs on Katalog
So gooood! Quite brutal and dark, more by dialogue and implication than anything else. The continuous shots are incredible especially for the time. Has a slightly superficial post-war philosophical discussion. Men who think themselves especially smart are unbelievably dumb.
Long before chronically online men who mistake devouring information for intellect, dullness for also intellect and lack of emotional intelligence for, somehow also, intellect, and long before men who thought that Patrick Bateman is a role model rather than a literal joke, we had men who read about Nietzsche’s Übermensch and came to the only logical conclusion — that exactly they must be intellectually superior to, well, basically, everyone else. The lone wolves, the misunderstood geniuses. And yet, this need for intellectual superiority never seems to be confined to their solitude. In Rope, Philip is dying for Brandon’s validation, Brandon desperately needs Rupert’s validation. They’re so convinced of their superiority yet somehow they still need validation of other men, to whom they obsessively submit to. Nietzsche cannot validate you beyond the grave but you can quote him out of context like a good boy (in 2026, in 1940s it went a bit differently…), and for everything else there’s a myriad of podcasters and whatever the fuck other superior specimen that you can throw your likes and comments at. Please, daddy, tell me how smart I am. Rope may be from 1948, and considering the timing and the theme of who is worthy of living or dying it’s, you know… serious, but I would argue this daddy take of mine is by no means a stretch or a 2026 perspective that cannot be applied to the movie. The validation part is very present, at times even spiced with Freud references. Plus, they all stand very close to each other at all times. Like, very close. ||David was incredibly smart and studious. So I believe that Brandon never thought of him inferior because of his intellect but because he was, as we find out, beloved, kind and empathetic. And to the emotionally empty and repressed, that means inferior.|| I love you, David, in my mind I will make up a story where things went differently for you. Saw this for the first time when I was 11. Might have influenced some attitudes.
The best thing about this film, the reason I enjoyed it so much, is not that it’s just the gayest film I’ve seen in a long time — and my media consumption has leant exceptionally gay in the past few months — it’s that it was based on a much less deliberately funny, much more subtextual book. I’ve heard it said that the original author saw the film and was violently dissatisfied with it, horrified by how much it deviated from his work. And isn’t that just a fantastic predicament? Imagine writing this very gritty, very psychosexual, in many ways very revealing play about morality and life and truth masculinity and femininity and sexuality, and then this famous film maker buys the rights (presumably, I don’t know how such things were handled back then), immediately picks up on all your tortured gay yearnings and is just like yep, gotcha. Say no more. And he just — runs with it. Makes, as I said, the gayest film ever made at the time and high up there still, for the weight of it if nothing else. That’s gotta be so strange, both gratifying and violating — and it’s being done by a man, a man whom you might respect far more than any woman, a man whom you almost have to take seriously. Imagine that. Imagine if Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about your very specific very personal, very illegal, fetish. And invited you to see it, like here you go. I hope you like it. We’ll be airing it in cinemas and will be sure to properly credit you. I hope that story is not apocryphal, I really do. It really ties the whole movie together beautifully.
