Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, first released on August 28 1948, remains to this day something of a curio within the great director’s cannon. Neither attributed classic status alongside the likes of North By Northwest, Vertigo and Psycho, nor completely under appreciated as, say, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Under Capricorn or Topaz, the film still contains many classic Hitchcockian moments of suspense and bold imagination and deserves repeat viewing by devotees and casual movie fans alike. Not least in that it highlights an American society on the brink of change, prefiguring many of the social arguments that would dominate the coming decade, and in the process gives the audience an intriguing glimpse of the political side of cinema’s ‘Master of Suspense’.

Like those of John Ford, the films of Alfred Hitchcock are to be found somewhere on the right; which is not to say that Hitchcock inserted direct political messages into his films, instead political themes (and, presumably, those of his collaborators) emerged during the filmmaking process, with writers, producers, even actors, all competing with Hitchcock for a share in the overall vision.

Superficially here, the vision, the visual storytelling, is all Hitchcock, and Rope finds the director in a somewhat experimental mood.  While experimentation has never been Hitchcock’s stock-in-trade, fans will be able to point to more than a little visual chicanery in his filmography, from the Dali dream sequence and subjective camerawork in Spellbound, to the confined settings of Rear Window and Lifeboat, to the colourful surrealism of Vertigo, but here Hitchcock allows himself more room; the story unfolds in only ten takes, with dizzying, constantly moving camerawork.

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