Alfred Hitchcock could be the most famous director to live. His name is synonymous with the word “suspense”, having designed some of the most beautiful films of all time, but the acclaimed director was also very controversial during his life. His masterpiece of “psycho” horror was accused of being unnecessarily violent and sexually perverse, but his most controversial film could be a surprise for anyone who does not know his long filmography.
Hitchcock’s criminal thriller in 1948 “Rope” was considered a lower entry before having a critical reassessment in the last decade. He was best known as a footnote to be the first Hitchcock Technicolor film and its unconventional production. Based on the true story of two Chicago students who also tried to get away with “The Perfect Crime”, Hitchcock decided to tell the story in real time, bringing together several long catches to give the appearance of a film that never cuts action. The favorite of perennial Hitchcock James Stewart embodies the master’s house in the boy’s preparatory school and the voice of morality, which the boys put to the test.
The film was remarkably controversial, even according to Hitchcock’s standards. He faced a strong pressure from film censors at the time of the production code which applied a hard and arbitrary set of rules against everything that was considered amoral, and when he finally screened in theaters, the advice of censorship in Seattle, Atlanta and Memphis prohibited the film from being screened in their respective cities. The New York Times reports that “Rope” had already played for a day at the Orpheum theater in Seattle before the censors prohibited future projections, while in Chicago, the police “prohibited the photo on the reason that he was not” healthy “entertainment. Warner Bros. was able to call on the decision and bring the picture back into the theaters as a film “Adults only”, but the question of why the film turned out to be so controversial that persists for Hitchcock fans who are rediscovering the film today. There are three main reasons why two, in evidence, in the opening moments of the film and a hidden subversively in the subtext.
The censors fell on Rope’s graphic violence, the high consumption of the characters and the casual amorality
During this period in the history of the film, the motion Picture Association of America had a strong hand to shape the content deemed acceptable to represent in the film. Despite his stature in the film industry, Hitchcock was indebted to these censors like everyone else, and the historian Katie Reid explains exactly how the “rope” ran unlike these censors in his room for screen culture.
“Rope” opens with his two bad guys, Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger), strangling their former classmate David Kentley (Dick Hogan) to their house in an act of relaxed cruelty. It is an surprisingly brutal opening to a film, even according to Hitchcock’s standards, and the censorships of the film opposed it immediately.
Hitchcock adapted the script for a play based on the story of Léopold and Loeb, and the film’s censor Joseph Breen quickly distinguished the disturbing violence of history and his “very specious but well -written discourse in which fundamentally moral values are refused and even made ridiculous”. He also distinguished the sections where “the ten commandments were treated harshly and advised these elements of dialogue to be withdrawn because they would be a” great infraction to the film of the film “.”
Hitchcock assured these censors that the film would not approve of the actions of the killer, but the censors still tried to force Hitchcock to completely remove the scene from the opening murder, including a moment when Brandon wins his fingerprints of a drink, fearing that it would serve as a guide “how to escape with the murder” for the public.
But what was most concerned about the film Board was even more commonplace according to today’s standards: alcohol. Throughout the script, Phillip drinks champagne to calm his nerves, and Breen asked “he is maintained to a certain extent necessary for the characterization or motivation of the plot”. Even if the era of the ban had ended a decade before, the representation of alcohol in the film was still heavy, and Hitchcock was able to prove that the use of alcohol was absolutely necessary to tell its story.
But these concerns would pale in relation to the greatest taboo that Hitchcock would explore, which turns out to be his greatest lasting heritage.
The subversive queerness of the rope linganed while the subtext censors did not resume until it is too late
Hiding as a subtext through “rope” is the relationship between its two killers, Brandon and Phillip. These two are more than roommates, and the film strongly implies a homosexual relationship between them. This aspect of the film slipped beyond the vision of censorship for a large part of the film’s production, until a letter sent by Breen explicitly prohibited Hitchcock from exploring this aspect of the characters:
“We also obtained a possible flavor in a part of the dialogue according to which a homosexual relationship existed between Brandon and Phillip. [the real killers who inspired the film] … Such treatment could not be acceptable under the terms of the production code. “”
Hitchcock played stupid about these homosexual shades, but behind the scenes, he did everything he could to amplify them. He hired Gay Scriptwriter Arthur Laurent and threw the lover of Laurents, Farley Granger, in a main role. Hitchcock would have been delighted to “hide a secret gay love story in his film,” even if it led to a meticulous examination of his bosses in Warner Bros.
He was able to push the “rope” by production, more or less intact, but the controversy that followed took his own life. Smoking the viciously amoral film, the film censors in conservative pockets across the country refused to allow the distribution of the film, with several censors demanding that the strangulation scene be withdrawn from the painting.
The New York Times notes that this “particular” censorship comes after the film was considered “morally irreproachable for adults” and that there was no objection pronounced by religious groups “, which suggests that these censors have taken on them to ban the film. By rethinking now, perhaps these censors have taken up the subversive and strange elements of the film, even if they could not Finger on it, they therefore used the supposed violence of the film as an eminent goat to justify censorship.
Fortunately, their attempt at repression did not prevent the film from playing elsewhere, and it is now considered not only the experimental masterpiece of Hitchcock, but as one of the greatest films subversively queer of all time. While the political repression on the arts returns in the dominant current, it is a reminder full of hope that censorship does not correspond to the creative ingenuity of an artist.
