Great Moments In Movie Shelves #110

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Since we're talking about Alfred Hitchcock & Farley Granger today (see also) I figure this is as good a time as any to give some love to the shelves that line one wall of the single apartment set of their 1948 collaboration, the diabolical homosexual classic Rope. So much of the film takes place with those shelves hovering in the background. And it's not just random set dressing either...

... since books play such an important role in the story. Phillip (Granger) and Brandon (John Dall) spend the entire night toying with their former teacher Rupert (Jimmy Stewart), who is also a book publisher - it's these dastardly gays' intellectualism that's poisoned their minds and convinced them they're too smart and superior for regular ol' human law, driving them to murder, and Hitch continually visualizes this by having them actually use books to literally cover the murder...

... as they pile books on top of the box the dead body is hiding inside of during their dinner party. And of course there's the bundle of books that they tie up with the titular murder weapon itself.

Books are deadly, people!

We never get a better look at the right side of their apartment than this, as far as I recall, but even here Hitch keeps the piles of books in the frame. Heck you even get the sense of the written word looming large, sealing their doom, via those gigantic neon letters outside the windows! It's suffocating, all this learning.
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