Rope

Rope (1948) is a film Hitchcock made as an experiment, and the experiment is discussed more than the film. He wanted it to appear as one unbroken take. A reel of film at the time ran about ten minutes. So every ten minutes the camera moves behind a back, a chest or a piece of furniture, the frame goes dark, the reel is changed, and it continues from the same position. There are hidden cuts in the film and an attentive viewer will find them. The cost was severe. The set was built with walls on wheels, and as actors and equipment cleared the camera's path the walls were silently rolled aside. One mistake meant redoing the whole ten minutes. The story: two young men kill a friend and put his body in a chest. Then they hold a cocktail party on top of that chest for the dead boy's family and their old schoolmaster. The entire film takes place in that apartment. It draws on the Leopold and Loeb murder of 1924, in which two wealthy young men who considered themselves superior killed someone to prove it. Hitchcock later said the experiment did not work; being unable to cut made suspense harder to build. It runs 80 minutes. Good for: film technique, Hitchcock, and single location thrillers. Less good for: the pace is slow and theatrical; there is no violence, but the subject is a party held over a corpse.