320. Rope with special guest Jackson Cooper

"You're quite a good chicken strangler as I recall." We watched "Rope" directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with our dear friend Jackson Cooper, and yes - it's the gay one. Hitchcock is obsessed with characters committing the "perfect murder" and who better to attempt it in this go-round than two messy gays on the verge of "squabbling" over this opportunity? Based on the famous true-crime Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s, Rope is giving us classic Hitchcock high tension, suspense, and intrigue but without any instance of a classic "Hitchcock Blonde." What we get instead are two handsome Nietzsche-obsessed Ivy League men with a false sense of superiority and a not-so-subtle same-sex relationship. Let's be real - Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) bicker like an old married couple and their strange dom/sub dance only gets weirder when their old Headmaster (Jimmy Stewart) comes in and throws a monkey wrench into their plot and their co-dependent spats. All the homoeroticism may have flown under the radar for the audience in the late 1940s but the gays always knew. Maybe the evil/psycho/murderous homosexual is a tired trope but Farley Granger and John Dall are just so darn cute and watching this film through a queer lens is a ton of fun, which helps since this material is pretty dark. Aside from the un-aliving in the first scene, it's Scenes From a Gay Marriage and we love it.

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Cover Art by Shaun Piela