Alfred Hitchcock's First Color Movie Is Secretly An LGBTQ+ Masterpiece
Alfred Hitchcock stirred the pot for 1940s Hollywood censor boards with his release of the remarkably LGBTQ+ Rope. By casting queer actors as well as assuring the script and narrative would be queer-coded, Hitchcock inadvertently created an LGBTQ+ masterpiece that remains revolutionary more than 70 years later. Rope caused significant controversy at the time of its release but has sparked conversation in queer film study in the decades following.
In August 1948, Rope hit theaters as Alfred Hitchcock's first technicolor film. The film is adapted from a British play of the same name and based loosely on the true-crime story of Leopold and Loeb, two young men who decided to kill their cousin together in 1924. The screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, was an openly gay playwright who went on to write the musical Gypsy and a bilingual revival of West Side Story. The only music utilized in the film after the opening credits was produced by another queer artist, infamous composer Francis Poulenc. Hitchcock went out of his way to cast two queer actors for the starring roles, John Dall and Farley Granger. He tried to cast Cary Grant in Jimmy Stewart's role but Grant turned him down.
Related: Why Clint Eastwood Turned Down An Alfred Hitchcock Movie
Due to Leopold and Loeb's queer identities, Hitchcock knew what the film Rope would imply to the censor boards who had to abide by the Hays Code. «Any inference of sex perversion,» was a broad rule in the code that included homosexual representation. Rope would have been banned or irredeemably censored if Arthur Laurents hadn't tampered with the original British script enough for the queer narrative to slip under the radar. Alfred Hitchcock's history of movies has always embraced what
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