Welcome bac;k to Leopold and Loeb week. On Monday I posted Henry Fonda’s tour de force performance as Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who successfully kept Leopold and Loeb from being executed. Yesterday we watched the trailer of the L&L inspired movie ‘Compulsion’. Today lets watch a very impressive long-take climatic scene from another story influenced by the case, Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’, adapted from a play by Arthur Laurents. The movie is shot in ten single take scenes using a device–usually a doorway that the camera passes through with the image briefly blocked–to create the impression that the entire movie is accomplished in one continuous shot. This is a trick that’s since been perfected in movies like ‘Birdman’ and ‘1917’ but was an innovation when Hitch did it and considerably harder to accomplish using only a dolly on a set packed with lights, screens and flags. (Most of that equipment has since disappeared in the age of digital filmmaking–at least on my sets). You can see what I’m talking about in terms of the blocked shot disguising a cut at 2:32, when James Stewart opens the cabinet into the camera. For my money, the technique is more disruptive than effective as I can never quite stop watching the movement of the camera and fully lose myself in the story. In the case of ‘Rope’ it simply serves to play up the scripts theatricality and not diminish it. But Hitch was Hitch and he got bored easily, needing to set new and challenging goals for himself. Indeed, one of my favorite Hitch lines was uttered to his biographer Donald Spoto on the set of ‘Family Plot’–his last movie. Sitting wearily in his chair while lighting adjustments were made, Hitch looked up to Spoto and said mournfully: ‘Donald, wake me when the movie’s over’.