Rope (1949)

James Stewart, Farley Granger
Hitchcock

colonel mustard in the observatory with...

I can never shake the sense that Hitchcock is mocking his actors.  Especially when he hires dopes like Farley Granger, of all people.  I can't figure out what Jimmy Stewart was doing in this movie either; he was cast completely against type, and some of his dialogue totally freaks me out.  Here's an excerpt:

Stewart : After all, murder is - or should be - an art. Not one of the 'seven lively', perhaps, but an art nevertheless. And, as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals.
other guy : And the victims: inferior beings whose lives are unimportant anyway.
Stewart : Obviously. Now, mind you, I don't hold with the extremists who feel that there should be open season for murder all year round. No, personally, I would prefer to have..."Cut a Throat Week"... or, uh, "Strangulation Day"...

Only an ass would have a conversation like this, and Jimmy Stewart is never an ass.  That one threw me for a loop.  Of course, it's meant as a joke, but even in that context, he sounds like an ass

I thought Rope was boring as all fuck.  The antagonist is just your run-of-the-mill psychopath so enamored of himself that he has no insight into others' motivations. I could have spit out Stewart's final speech in a face-off with any devotee of Nietzche (although it seeems that it's Ayn Rand who is all the rage these days).

of course, the worst part of all is that I can't even find a decent screenshot

The good news is, I got to watch it on youtube, for free, and in high-definition too.  This is because Rope is in the public domain.  I like to think that Hitchcock got so pissed off by the popularity of certain works of pseudo-fiction by a certain Ayn named Rand that he purposefully forgot to renew the copyright in an idealistic bid to even marginally reduce the number of idiots on the planet.

Yes, youtube user @starlicense, Farley and Brandon were probably gay for each other, but that's kind of missing the point; wouldn't you agree?