Just before hosting a dinner party, Philip Morgan (Farley Granger) and Brandon Shaw (John Dall) strangle a mutual friend to death with a piece of rope, purely as a Nietzsche-inspired philosophical exercise. Hiding the body in a chest upon which they then arrange a buffet dinner, the pair welcome their guests, including the victim’s oblivious fiancée (Joan Chandler) and the college professor (James Stewart) whose lectures inadvertently inspired the killing.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope will be accompanied by a lecture from Jeff Hughes, graduate student in the Cinema Studies department at NYU Tisch. Jeff will be joined by the editor in chief of the Hitchcock Annual and one of the great Hitch scholars, Sidney Gottlieb.