The insistence of the camera on following its subject around adds to the feeling of tension in much the same way as a musical score does, but more subtly.
But if any one star is associated with Hitchcock’s movies, it is Jimmy Stewart, whose first collaboration with the director was 1948’s Rope, a psychological thriller based on the Leopold and Loeb murders. Rope was shot with long, unbroken shots, around seven to nine minutes long, with minimal editing. The whole movie takes place on one set, a penthouse apartment where two young men are hosting a dinner, thrilled at the fact that none of the guests suspect they have killed a mutual friend whose body is concealed in the coffee table. Stewart plays the young men’s philosophy professor, who exposed them to the Nietzschean ideas that inspired them to take a life—and in the end, he is the one who exposes them as well. Rope was also Hitch’s first color film, and the use of the heavy Technicolor cameras not only made the long shots more complicated to set up, but made the effect that much more impressive—the lack of the cuts the audience is used to. The insistence of the camera on following its subject around adds to the feeling of tension in much the same way as a musical score does, but more subtly.