ROPE
TCM, 6:30 p.m. ET
Alfred Hitchcock not only made a series of great films, he kept himself interested along the way by giving himself some very formidable challenges. In 1948’s Rope, his goal was to direct a film that looked like one long, unbroken scene, from start to finish, with continuous and unedited action. Because of the technology of the day, and the length and limitation of film reels, all he could do was film in 10-minute blocks, and concoct clever edit points to connect those scenes as unobtrusively as possible. Farley Granger and John Dall star as smarmy young New Yorkers who decide to commit murder just to see if they can get away with it, and James Stewart – in his first film with Hitchcock, before reteaming on such classics as North by Northwest and Vertigo – plays their former schoolteacher, and unwitting source of inspiration for the killers. If you love the sort of inventive, long-take filmmaking present in portions of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas in 1990, Robert Altman’s The Player and John Woo’s Hard Boiled (both from 1992), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998), Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013), and Alejandro Inarritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) in 2014 and his The Revenant in 2015, you’ll love this, too. (Clearly, I've been a fan of long takes for a long time...)