This Month:
Rope (1948)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

While there’s an obvious connection between Hitchcock’s classic thriller, ROPE, and the Art Museum's current exhibit of Alex Buchanan’s repurposed nautical materials, there’s also a deeper, perhaps more sinister connection as well. “Aberration,” the name the former mariner turned artist calls his exhibition, could just as easily apply to the PSYCHO and NORTH BY NORTHWEST director’s one take wonder.

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.