Production and home video
- Director’s cameo even more discreet continuation of that for Lifeboat
- One of the five “missing Hitchcocks” hardly seen for almost two decades
- 1985–2025: Forty years and four different transfers available on home video
- Sparse soundtrack reflects strived-for realism of director’s most famous films
- Only one true remake despite source of popular play with dozens of adaptations
Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.
Rope: Writing on a Classic, Pt 2: More writing; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Production and home video
Contents
- Cameo
- Distribution
- Home video
- Soundtrack
- On the radio
- Related articles
Cameo
This 1958 re-release UK quad poster by Stafford & Co., Nottingham, sold recently for £495; for more info see Suspicion
Although he doesn’t appear in person, Hitch’s near-customary cameo in Rope is a direct follow-up to his similarly oblique appearance in Lifeboat, which was also copied in Dial M for Murder. All three have small casts and a single, restrictive setting, so a more creative approach was required. As Hitch himself said:
“Those 200 miniature neon signs in the New York skyline cyclorama helped me solve a little problem of my own. It’s traditional, with me at least, that I appear fleetingly in every one of my pictures. But Rope, with a cast of only nine people who never leave the apartment, looked like the end of the Hitchcock tradition. There was just no way that I could get into the act. Then someone came up with a solution. The result? The Hitchcock countenance will appear in a neon “Reduco” sign on the side of a miniature building!” – Hitch: My Most Exciting Picture/cntd/text
He is often said to have an additional cameo as part of the couple walking down the street during Rope’s opening sequence but this is patently untrue, as proven by Warner Bros.’ own production records. It doesn’t help that in the DVD and BD featurette, “Rope Unleashed” (2001, 32:28), screenwriter Arthur Laurents claims ’tis so – indeed, the rumour probably started there. In the same breath, he also says, “Hitchcock is in every one of his pictures…” (20:40); he wasn’t: out of 56, it was 38 at most. We can safely attribute this to the then 83-year-old Laurents’ fading memory; first-hand accounts are an invaluable record but can’t always be taken as gospel, especially more than 50 years after the fact. Unfortunately, his claim (“Hitchcock is seen from a bird’s eye view”) is further perpetuated on the rear of many VHS and DVD sleeves.
In the same doc, Pat Hitchcock also unwittingly states, “My father had always wanted to photograph a stage play but he was never quite sure whether it would be a success or not, so he never did it until… [he made] Rope” (13:40). Whoops: Hitch actually directed nine stage adaptations prior to shooting Rope. It’s always best to rely on documentary evidence where possible; remember: “The palest ink is clearer than the best memory.” File both examples under Hitchcock myth.
Distribution
- Return of the ‘missing’ Hitchcocks – Andrew Sarris
- Hitch’s Riddle: On Five Rereleased Films – Dave Kehr, When Movies Mattered (2011)
- H’s Rereleased Films: From Rope to Vertigo (1991) – ed. Walter(s) Raubicheck and Srebnick
Rope was the first film from Transatlantic Pictures, the short-lived production company Hitch formed with his lifelong friend Sidney Bernstein. But Rope did little more than break even at the box office and was even banned in some US cities owning to its thinly veiled gay subtext. The second Transatlantic film, Under Capricorn, suffered commercially for several reasons, not least of which was married star Ingrid Bergman’s well-publicised affair at the time of its release.
Warner Bros. handled US distribution for both films and Transatlantic’s third outing, Stage Fright, but it ran into production difficulties and was acquired wholesale by Warner. Thereafter, further projects, ironically including future successes Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief, failed to come to fruition and the company was dissolved in 1953. At least Hitch’s lucrative contract meant the rights to Rope reverted solely to him eight years after its release; the same applied to four of the five films he made for Paramount, barring To Catch a Thief. Under Capricorn was set to join them under Hitch’s control but box office failure led to it being repossessed by its financiers, the Bankers Trust, resulting in its present-day ‘singleton’ status.
“Back in 1953, Hitchcock wanted all rights of his forthcoming films to revert back to him. His agents at the time, Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein, then set up a deal with Paramount wherein Hitchcock got back Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo and Psycho. Eventually, [1962] Hitchcock sold the rights to Psycho to Universal for a block of stock [150,000 shares] that made him the studio’s third largest stockholder. The first and second largest were Wasserman and Stein. After Hitchcock died in 1980, Universal bought the distribution rights to [the remaining four ]. Company officials declined to disclose the price paid to the Hitchcock estate, but industry insiders peg it at about $6 million [2025: circa $22m].” – Boston Globe
Incidentally, with it being based on an unknown, contentious property and having no big stars, Universal balked at financing Psycho, so Hitch offered a combined deal whereby he would fund it himself and film at Universal Studios with his Shamley Productions TV crew. They were mainly used for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Suspicion and Startime, so worked quickly and cheaply. Universal would then distribute Psycho and in lieu of his usual $250,000 director’s fee, he’d retain a 60% stake in the film negative, to which they agreed. In all, it turned out to be one of the most lucrative deals in film history, making him a multimillionaire overnight, in the wake of Psycho’s mammoth success.
In 1967, Hitch withdrew his five remaining films from circulation, which included the four he made with James Stewart, until his dispute with Universal over distribution fees (“We wanted more money.“) was finally settled by his estate in 1983. The “missing Hitchcocks” were immediately re-released (orig) to cinemas worldwide over the ensuing two years and have been available in all media without interruption ever since. Their 1980s reception was, ahem, almost universally ecstatic across the board – marking the start of Vertigo’s long overdue critical ascension – but reviews for Rope ranged from slightly reserved to very positive.

UK 1984 re-release quad poster by Lonsdale & Bartholomew Ltd., Nottingham. See the entry for Suspicion.
However, the five’s archival elements hadn’t been stored very carefully in the intervening years and their condition ranged from less than optimal to pretty poor. When they went back on theatrical release, it was via newly struck but fairly average looking 35mm prints but as noted in their individual articles, almost every film Hitch made has suffered various third party alterations to his final approved versions and Rope is no exception.
Universal added their anachronistic modern ident and clumsily chopped the film’s opening and closing credits to remove the logo of original distributors Warner Bros. To add insult to injury, they also overlaid the credits score with a new stereo recording! Erk. Needless to say, this butchered version was also the source of all pre-DVD home video copies. Such vandalism has been committed many times on the Master’s oeuvre, the most egregious of which is also by Universal, but this was years before their comprehensive mangling of the original soundtracks of Vertigo and Psycho, in 1996 and 2010 respectively. Clearly, the writing was already on the wall.
Preserved transfer
- US/Canada: DVD (2001, reissued 2006)
- UK: DVD (2001, reissued 2007)
- Italy: DVD (2001, reissued 2007, 2015)
Universal thankfully dropped Rope’s previous altered version for its move into the digital age, releasing it unmolested via a combined print with the original Warner credits logo intact, albeit still prefaced with Universal’s anachronistic ident. This film and Shadow of a Doubt are the only two of the 14 Universal-owned Hitchcocks not to be remastered on DVD since their first releases in 2001. This is not such a bad thing; their original transfers look fine and more than suffice for the format but each of the two HD transfers since advance considerably over them.
- Germany: DVD (2001, reissued 2006)
- France: DVD (2001, reissued 2006/2007, 2017)
- Spain: DVD/alt (2001, reissued/alt 2009, 2014)
Extras on all DVDs consist of the “Rope Unleashed” featurette (2001, 32:28), photo gallery (7:30), production notes and the original trailer (2:27). The sole exceptions are the PAL DVDs which additionally contain the Universal Classics 1983 re-release trailer above, narrated by James Stewart (6:14) and featuring highlights of all five films. It also appears on all The Trouble with Harry PAL DVDs, all Rear Window DVDs and all The Man Who Knew Too Much DVDs and BDs.
Timeline of Historical Film Colors: Technicolor three-strip print
In Germany, Rope is known as Cocktail für eine Leiche (Cocktail for a Corpse). Subtle. It wasn’t released in West Germany until 1963, when it received a new dub which was redone in 1984, as were all the other re-released “missing Hitchcocks” bar The Man Who Knew Too Much. Rope’s latest dub can be sampled on the identical domestic-UK-Australian-Dutch-Scandinavian DVD, all non-US BDs and all UHD-BDs.
Stewart was voiced by Siegmar Schneider (1916–1995) who, as well as doing both dubs, stood in for the actor a whopping 37 times on other films and TV programmes. These included also pulling double duty three decades apart on The Glenn Miller Story (1954), Rear Window and Vertigo; he also voiced Scottie Ferguson a third time for the Vertigo clip in Twelve Monkeys (1995). Lastly, Schneider stood in for Stewart on the 1956 dub of The Man Who... and, of course, his narration on the 1983 re-release trailer’s German version above.
Bootlegs are anything not from Universal, eg those from Chile (Cinematekka/set/set, M&M, VMC Editores), South Korea (Cine Korea, Cleo Entertainment) and Taiwan (BitWel BD).
Remastered transfer
For its initial 2012 appearance in Universal’s Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection BD sets, Rope was given a new 2k scan of the previous transfer’s preserved print, which upped the A/V ante considerably but was still short of a full restoration. Nonetheless, it will satisfy all but the most discerning cinephiles and some areas still equals the latest transfer. Extras are the same as the DVDs, minus the production notes and all BDs are region 0, like all Universals, and there are only two variants: the identical US/Canadian disc and that issued everywhere else, with a host of sub and dub options.
Restored transfer
- Prime Video HD | YouTube
- US: UHD-BD/BD (2023)
- Canada: UHD-BD/BD (2023)
The latest transfer is of a full restoration from the Technicolor three-strip separation negatives which brings expected improvements in alignment of the matrices and finer grain resolution. However, the previous remaster still compares quite favourably and the benefits of this version are more apparent the larger your screen. All discs are region 0 and identical, with a total of 16 sub and dub options, with extras as per the BDs.
Now Showing: worldwide screenings
Screenshots
There are many useful screenshot comparisons, courtesy of the invaluable Hitchcock Zone, Caps-holic and below:
- Duo: DVD US, UK | BD | UHD-BD
- Rope: DVD US, UK | BD | UHD-BD
- Trio: DVD US, UK | BD | UHD-BD
- Duo #2: DVD US, UK | BD | UHD-BD
- Trio #2: DVD US, UK | BD | UHD-BD
- Duo #3: DVD US, UK | BD | UHD-BD
- Trio #3: DVD US, UK | BD | UHD-BD
Soundtrack
Alisa Malova, Christopher Goodpasture/#2
- Unravelling Music in H’s Rope – Kevin Clifton
- The Musical Function of Sound in Rope, Lifeboat and Rear Window – Helen Cox and David Neumeyer
Like the similarly sparse Jamaica Inn, Lifeboat and Rear Window, the only specially-composed score in Rope is that heard over the opening and closing credits; in this case composed by David Buttolph. Two other pieces of diegetic music help underpin the narrative: Francis Poulenc’s Mouvement perpétuel no. 1 (1918) is briefly referenced in the title theme then later played three times on the piano. Second is The Three Suns’ January 1948 recording of “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover” (1927), which plays on a phonograph.
- BMG 2-LP/CD The Three Suns Shine Again (1991)
- Acrobat 2-CD Peg o’ My Heart: Selected Singles 1944-56 (2024)
Buttolph’s two-minute title theme has seen official release via the original soundtrack recording and a 1994 re-recording. Both have appeared on several Hitchcock compilations, the most comprehensive of which are below, while the original is also on three CD bootlegs from the UK (Enlightenment Records) and Netherlands (Factory of Sounds/#2).
- Milan 2-CD/23-MP3 Alfred Hitchcock and His Music (2013)
- Cinezik 2-LP Best Scores From AH’s Films (2020)
- Silva Screen 2-CD/MP3 Psycho: The Essential AH (1999) City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra cond. Paul Bateman
Remake
There are various screen and radio works arising from the Leopold and Loeb case; the most prominent after Hitch’s film being Compulsion (1959), based on Meyer Levin’s eponymous 1956 novel, directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Orson Welles. The third theatrical outing is Swoon (1992), written, produced, directed and edited by Tom Kalin.
BBC Radio 4 Front Row discussion of Rope (2009, 9-16min)
Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play of his spin on the case generated six TV movies from 1939–1968, and the first of four for the BBC was a long-take version that inspired Hitch’s approach. BBC Radio first broadcast eight adaptions of the play between 1932–1983 and a November 30, 1952, episode of the US’s NBC Best Plays stars Hurd Hatfield and Victor Jory. But as these were all derived directly from the source text rather than the much-altered script of Hitch’s film, a 2017 episode of the SmorgShow Theater radio podcast is the only bona fide remake to date.
Rope: Writing on a Classic, Pt 2: More writing; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Production and home video
Related articles
This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.