It was relatively early in his career that Alfred Hitchcock directed Rope; at least it was early enough for any director to be up for all kinds of cinematic experimentation. Granted, one might say that Hitchcock became more adventurous towards the latter stages of his career, such as in the game-changing work that is Psycho, but his most audacious effort might have come in this 1948 film about two friends hosting a dinner party immediately after, for S’s and G’s basically, murdering and hiding the body of a colleague in their apartment. As in, they serve dinner on top of the trunk they hide him in.
The film plays as if it’s done entirely in one shot. This was in 1948, so there were plenty of technical obstacles they had to clear, but for the time this was completely incredible. One of the hurdles came with the capacity of film camera magazines: you could only load about 10 minutes worth of film into a camera to shoot on in one take. So Hitchcock and company had to get creative; they made their best effort, and were rather successful, to hide the necessary cuts they had to make before their film ran out, so they’d zoom in on the black back of a guy’s suit jacket or some other area where they could cut, switch magazines, and then seam the shots together in the editing process. The result is a film that unfolds in real time, 50 years before Jack Bauer came along.
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