Farley Granger, Hitchcock & the gay subtext of Rope

Farley Granger talks about working with Alfred Hitchcock at A Different Light bookstore in West Hollywood, c. 2007. A 30-minute documentary, Rope Unleashed, after the cut, includes interviews with Farley Granger and playwright Arthur Larents, partners at the time Rope was filmed — a fact that reportedly tickled Hitchcock’s playfully wicked curiosity about anything sexually unconventional.

Screenwriter Arthur Laurents and star Farley Granger were lovers at the time of Rope’s production. Laurents discusses, in the HBO film of The Celluloid Closet, how they managed to fool the Hays Office and slip all of the gay subtext into the film. Hitchcock took the script and put back in all the English phrases from the original play, such as “my dear boy,” that Laurents had removed. The censors circled all of these phrases as being “homosexual dialogue” and missed everything else. Hitch could be quite clever. (CinemaQueer.com)