Rope

The best thing about this film, the reason I enjoyed it so much, is not that it’s just the gayest film I’ve seen in a long time — and my media consumption has leant exceptionally gay in the past few months — it’s that it was based on a much less deliberately funny, much more subtextual book. I’ve heard it said that the original author saw the film and was violently dissatisfied with it, horrified by how much it deviated from his work. And isn’t that just a fantastic predicament? Imagine writing this very gritty, very psychosexual, in many ways very revealing play about morality and life and truth masculinity and femininity and sexuality, and then this famous film maker buys the rights (presumably, I don’t know how such things were handled back then), immediately picks up on all your tortured gay yearnings and is just like yep, gotcha. Say no more. And he just — runs with it. Makes, as I said, the gayest film ever made at the time and high up there still, for the weight of it if nothing else. That’s gotta be so strange, both gratifying and violating — and it’s being done by a man, a man whom you might respect far more than any woman, a man whom you almost have to take seriously. Imagine that. Imagine if Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about your very specific very personal, very illegal, fetish. And invited you to see it, like here you go. I hope you like it. We’ll be airing it in cinemas and will be sure to properly credit you. I hope that story is not apocryphal, I really do. It really ties the whole movie together beautifully.