Gay Movies: Rope

This year I decided to experiment with the 13th Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (yeah, it ended a while ago but I got a little behind with these posts). I volunteered for advanced ticket sales and box office. This allowed me to see some movies for free and I can use my leftover comps for what the staff and volunteers at this festival kept referring to as "the straight film festival". However, I think it would be more accurately described as "the bi-curious film festival", they've got a little bit of everything.

I started off slow by seeing Rope, an excellent film by Alfred Hitchcock that I'd seen before. I love that it begins with the murder and then all of the suspense is generated from whether or not the two murderers will get away with it. All of the action is confined to one apartment (Hume Cronyn adapted the script from a play) and Hitchcock films it with long takes that are seamlessly connected to give illusion that the entire movie consists of two or three extremely long tracking shots. All of this adds an immediacy with a claustrophobic edge that ratchets up the tension.

The plot itself is loosely inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case. Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb were University of Chicago students who murdered a 14-year-old boy, believing themselves to be Nietzschean supermen capable of committing "the perfect crime" without fear of capture. They were wrong.

Leopold and Loeb also had a homosexual relationship which the film implies without ever dealing with directly. For example, at one point their maid, commenting on the students foul post-strangulation moods, says "They must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning" gently implying that a single bed was involved.

To be honest, I was a little surprised that PIGLFF decided to show this film. It plays on outdated stereotypes and clearly associates homosexuality with deviant behavior. I guess they were just happy to get any screen-time in 1948. But I suppose the main reason they decided to show it is because they were giving the Artistic Achievement Award to Farley Granger and they were like, "Hey, let's show that really good gay-Hitchcock movie. You know, while we're at it."


Jimmy Stewart's in this too but he's not gay. Or is he?