Rope, Alfred Hitchcock's first color film, was adapted from Patrick Hamilton's stage play Rope's End by no less than Hume Cronyn. Loosely inspired by the Leopold-Loeb case, the plot concerns two implicitly homosexual college chums, played by Farley Granger and John Dall. Their heads filled with Nietzchean philosophy by their kindly professor James Stewart (he's grayed at the temples, but he still looks too young for his part), Granger and Dall kill a third friend just for the thrill of it. The boys hide the body in an antique chest in the middle of their posh apartment, then perversely arrange to hold a dinner party around the chest, inviting the victim's family, friends and fiancee (Joan Chandler), as well as their intellectual role-model Stewart. As the guests wander obliviously around the sealed chest, the killers make snippy, veiled comments about their deed-never going so far as to reveal the existence of the body nor their involvement in the murder. As all the guests file out, however, professor Stewart begins to suspect that something is amiss. He forces the boys to reveal their awful secret, whereupon they claim that the inspiration for their murder was Stewart's abstract "man and superman" lectures. Before turning the killers over to the cops, Stewart absolves himself of guilt in an eloquent (if somewhat windy) curtain speech. In Rope, Hitchcock attempted the daunting technical challenge of filming the entire picture in one long, uninterrupted take. Actually, there are three changes of camera angles in the film, occurring at twenty-minute intervals to accommodate reel changeovers in the projection room (since a reel of film was divided into two ten-minute minireels back in 1948, the internal reel-breaks are "fudged" by having a dark object briefly obscure the camera lens, sustaining the illusion that no editing has taken place). The gimmick doesn't entirely come off, and tends to draw attention away from the story at hand. Still, we'd rather have an artistic miscalculation from Hitchcock than a "safe," conventional thriller from almost anyone else.