Queer Villain Spotlight: Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan (Rope)
Alfred Hitchcock's first Technicolor film focuses on two of the most venomous and murderous queers to have ever graced the big screen.
Queer Villain Spotlight is an ongoing series focusing on the many great queer villains who’ve appeared in film and TV.
At the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, a scream rends the air, before the camera reveals what has happened: Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) and Brandon Shaw (John Dall) have murdered their classmate in cold blood, strangling him with a piece of rope. They subsequently put his body in a chest which, at Brandon’s insistence, they subsequently use as a buffet table at the gathering they are hosting, a party which is attended by, among others, the dead man’s own father. Also attending the party is their old mentor, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), whose ideas about the superiority of certain individuals has given them the motivation for their murder. As the plot unfolds, Phillip slowly starts to fall apart under the strain, even as Cadell gradually realizes the truth, finally confronting both men and drawing the attention of the nearby police by shooting a gun out the apartment window.
I distinctly remember when I first watched this film. I was in graduate school, and my partner at the time asked me if I’d ever seen it. Though hardly ignorant of the works of Hitchcock, somehow Rope had managed to elude my notice but, at my partner’s urging, I decided to give it a look. Imagine my surprise, then, when I sat down to watch the film and saw a film about two obviously gay men who murder their former classmate and then have a party around his body.
Now, it must be said that gallons of ink have been spilled on this particular film, examining every aspect of it, from its technical play (it appears to be all one shot but was in reality several long takes seamlessly stitched together) to the vexed question of whether, in fact, the two men at its center are actually gay in the sense that we would understand the term. Equally contentious has been the question of how homophobic the film is, and whether it is symptomatic of a broader homophobia within Hitchcock’s output (and, in typical auteur fashion, his own psyche). For all of that, it does seem to occupy a rather less distinguished place in the Hitchcock canon than, say, Vertigo, North by Northwest, or Psycho.
What I find most interesting, then, is the extent to which Brandon and Phillip are by far the most fascinating figures in the whole damn film. The straight people who come to their apartment for the party are as dreary and starchy as post-war Americans could possibly be, whether it’s the young woman Janet Walker (Joan Chandler) or Henry Kentley (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), the father of the victim.None of them, it’s clear, lead particularly eventful lives, and it’s hard not to savor the fact that these two malicious homos have pulled one over on them.
There is a power, I think, in characters like Brandon and Phillip, cruel, rotten, spiritually and morally bankrupt as they are. John Dall’s Brandon is, for me, the more compelling of the two characters, as he appears to be the dominant one (dare I say the top?), the one who has most fully imbibed the Nietzschean philosophy of his mentor. He seems to relish the opportunity to not just prove how powerful, more to the point, how much more compelling they are than their straight counterparts, with all of their stuffy morality and utterly banal lives. Phillip particularly enjoys causing havoc among the straight couples and who, among us, hasn’t delighted in the chance to disrupt and mock straight love in all of its homogeneity?
Yet even Phillip, overwrought and angsty mess that he is, is still compelling in his own way. Part of this is quite simply the physical beauty of Farley Granger. While Hitchcock is far more notable for his skill in choosing pretty blondes for his films–Kim Novak, Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedron, and so on–he also had a keen eye for male beauty, whether it was the dashing Cary Grant, the nervous and boyish Anthony Perkins, or the the slick and stylish James Stewart. As his obituary in Time magazine put it, “ Granger gave sensual, almost perverse life to four great roles” one of which was, obviously, in Rope. The piece goes on to note “His good looks: sensuous face, doe eyes, full lips, jet-black haircould have come from a casting director's composite sketch of the Hollywood romantic lead,” before concluding that “he was the troubled soul of postwar America's moral turmoil, softer than Brando, darker than Dean.” To watch him fall apart in Rope as his guilt over what he’s done is like watching the epitome of postwar neuroses given human form. He is, in other words, the perfect vision of an erotics of suffering.
Of course, this being classic Hollywood, these murderous homos can’t be allowed to get away with their horrible crime, and so the last act sees Cadell return, where he proceeds to harangue them about just how awful and noxious and terrible they are for having taken the life of their classmate. Now, given that this is James Stewart we’re talking about, this whole speech is overwrought in the extreme; the man never encountered a diatribe that he didn’t emote to the hilt. To me, however, this all seems like far too little, too late, an expression, moreover, of Cadell’s own deep hypocrisy. Say what you will about Brandon and Phillip (or at least Brandon), they’re at least willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to acting out their political beliefs. To my eye, it’s clear that his rant is supposed to ring hollow, in a bit of Hitchcock’s signature wit. Fortunately, I think, the film doesn’t end with our murderous homos being led in handcuffs out of their posh apartment. The last image of the film is, instead, a very grim but ambiguous one, as Cadell, Brandon, and Phillip all sit in a tableau as the sirens wail outside and the lights flash along the walls.
These days, it’s common to look back at films like this one and take them to task for the way that they perpetuated harmful ideas about queer people. I would argue that, in the case of Rope, such an approach is wrong for two reasons. First, there’s the fact that queerness suffuses the very fabric of this film: Farley Granger was bisexual (though closeted at the time, obviously), John Dall was believed to be gay, and screenwriter Arthur Laurents was also gay. Second, this is Hitchcock we’re talking about, and if any director was as skilled with visual and narrative irony, it was Hitchcock.
So here’s to Brandon and Phillip, queer villains extraordinaire.