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There is no whodunit involved in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope--in the film's very first frames, well-brought-up young Manhattanites Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Farley Grainger) strangle a college friend with the title item. What sustains a modest amount of tension over the next 80 minutes is whether or not they're going to get caught. Loosely based on infamous 1920s murderers Leopold and Loeb, the pair kill out of a sense of entitlement and intellectual superiority and then hide the body in the middle of their sitting room and invite friends over for dinner, including their favorite teacher, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), who unwittingly gave them the idea in the first place. But what sustains the most interest in this 1948 film at this point is the way Hitchcock shot it: in a series of unbroken eight-minute takes, edited together in a relatively seamless fashion so that the story unfolds in something close to real time, a bravura feat in any era. And then there's the barely suppressed homoerotic dynamic between the campy Dall and the tremulous Grainger. Forget the technical challenges--one wonders how Hitch got away with that.