Rope
There must be something about wintertime because almost exactly one year ago I finally watched North by Northwest, a film that is unsurprisingly terrific and has most things Hitchcock, trailblazing in a way that leaves an entire generation or two of filmmakers still struggling and failing to catch up. Rear Window is my favorite Hitchcock because it doesn't just succeed brilliantly at a kind of formalist experiment that almost any other filmmaker would fail at, but because it does so in a way that feels necessary to every other piece of the Gestalt; just as Rear Window does not work nearly as well without the suffocating and at times voyeuristic framing device of a single vantage point, Rope's half-dozen excruciatingly long and naturalistic dolly takes instill in you the same claustrophobia that our viewpoint characters feel increasingly over the course of the evening, masterfully coming to a head as Jimmy Stewart pans throughout the room to describe what must have happened right before the opening credits.
And so many other things to note. John Dall and Joan Chandler, neither of whom I recall seeing before, are absolute delights in small and big roles respectively. The two leads are as openly gay as you can be in a film in 1948, and while the film's script is more interested in talking about class than any other qualifier, it is hard not to take in the idea that these two erstwhile boarding school chums are a sort of log cabin Republican enacting their vision of the Nietzschean Superman as an attempt to override the fact that most of polite society at that time would consider them the inferior and blighted ones who must be put down. I have rhapsodized for long enough without even mentioning Jimmy Stewart playing a role that, to his credit, is not so overbearingly Jimmy Stewart that it detracts from the entire thing. Nor have I mentioned the diegetic 80-minute runtime, nor many other delightful notes besides.
Hitchcock is a master. In one film and his first ever in color, he accomplishes a dozen things that any director would be deeply proud of. I can't think of a single thing that would have improved this film.