“Rope” was Alfred Hitchcock’s first film to be released in color, which wasn’t the most notable of its technical achievements. In fact, the filming technique that Hitchcock had embraced for the production was one of the most arduous and stress-inducing of either his or James Stewart‘s long careers. Based on the notorious Leopold-Loeb murder of 1924, the movie is made up of a short series eight ten-minute takes, ingeniously edited together to give the sense that the events of the movie are happening in real-time over the course of an unbroken 80 minutes (via Britannica).
Stewart told The New York Times at the time of the movie’s re-release in 1983: “It was the craziest, most difficult thing, it was completely new … Making it was so complicated.” Stewart also claimed that during filming he suggested to Hitchcock as a joke that they should build bleachers around the set and charge people to come and watch the cast sweat through the filming.
According to Stewart, it’s even possible to see the strain on the actors’ faces. “The last time I saw ‘Rope,’ he said, “maybe it was just my imagination but as the end of the reel came closer and closer I was conscious of everyone’s getting sort of glassy-eyed. All of us were thinking, ‘Oh God, don’t let me go up on my lines now If I do we’ll have to go back and do the whole thing again.'” However, Stewart told the paper that, despite the immense pressure, mistakes among Hitchcock’s top-drawer cast were rare, and filming went relatively smoothly.
