Leopold and Loeb’s arrest and subsequent trial, in which the pair were represented by famed attorney Clarence Darrow and ultimately sentenced to life in prison, captivated the American public, and that fascination quickly made its way into pop culture. Five years after the murder, in 1929, Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope was first produced in London.
The play was inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case but featured a few distinct changes: for one, it moved the setting to London’s tony Mayfair neighborhood, subbing in the British upper class for the American elite. By translating it to the British context, notes Schmid, “one of the things that the play makes more visible is an older tradition where the upper class are indeed associated with a certain kind of hedonism, a certain kind of moral corruption that has a long history. And so in doing so, the motives of Hamilton's killers become a little more comprehensible, a little more familiar than the motivations of Leopold and Loeb.”
Hamilton’s play also changed the age of the victim, making him a fellow student of the perpetrators. Notably, at the play’s start, the killers place his body in a chest that remains on stage throughout the story, even serving as a dinner table for unsuspecting party guests that include the dead man’s father. That narrative choice gets at the murderers’ desire for acknowledgement of their superiority, and the charge they get from hiding the body in plain sight—which made audiences complicit in their deceit.
Its one-act runtime, with no intermission, also kept tensions high. "I have gone all out to write a horror play and make your flesh creep," Hamilton said in the play’s preface, according to the BBC. "It is a thriller. A thriller all the time, and nothing but a thriller."
Alfred Hitchcock Experiments with Rope
Rope then made the move to the big screen in 1948, with a film adaptation helmed by Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense behind films like Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest. “Hitchcock was very interested in filming a play. He wanted to make a movie that was [telling a story] in real time, like a play, and make it one continuous shot,” author and film historian Tony Maietta tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Like the rest of the country, he was very intrigued by the Leopold and Loeb case and the complexities of it. And knowing Alfred Hitchcock, right up his alley, it's kind of a thrill killing. So that appealed to him. And also the technical tricks that he wanted to employ lent themselves very well to this film.”
Those technical efforts involved shooting the film to look like one continuous take, a directorial choice that’s more common now (think of the single-shot episodes in a series like Adolescence) but was incredibly unique for the time. Hitchcock used breakaway scenery that could be rolled away to allow massive Technicolor cameras to follow actors from one scene to the next, and would use tricks like a close-up of someone’s back to stitch together when one film reel would end and another would start. That required everything to be precisely choreographed: as Maietta notes, actor Jimmy Stewart, who played the killers’ college professor, once famously said the only thing that got rehearsal in Rope was the scenery.
Another element that made Hitchcock’s Rope radical for its time is the way it handled the heavily implied— and illegal—homosexual relationship between the characters inspired by Leopold and Loeb, now New York intellectuals called Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan. The screenplay, adapted from Hamilton’s play by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, had to balance the story’s queer subtext against the strict film production codes of that era. As Maietta explains, when Production Code Administration looked over the script, they cut out the so-called “dear boys” and other dialogue that seemed overtly homosexual, but what was left behind was more covert details, like looks shared between the men and implications that they shared a bedroom.
The film received favorable reviews upon its release, but wasn’t a box office smash. Over the decades, though, appreciation for it has grown. “Hitchcock became the auteur that we all revere now, and it's really interesting to look back at some of his earlier films, before Vertigo and North by Northwest and even To Catch a Thief. They're really fascinating because you're seeing the artist stretch and figure out how exactly to make these things his own,” Maietta says.
The film and play also stand as cultural interpretations of a murder that isn’t perhaps as well known today as other headline-grabbing killings, but they remain an early example of how a shocking case can grip the public and how people contend with what seems to be an incomprehensible act.
“Celebrity culture that has grown up around famous killers and around notorious true crime cases was only really getting started in a very, very basic way by the 1920s and only really started to kick into high gear, I would argue, once the Hays Code was abolished at the end of the 1960s,” Schmid says. “So I think [the Leopold and Loeb case] has this status as a crucial early case that in some ways predicts what was to come. Certain aspects of the case now feel much more familiar to us, and that in itself is a mark of its influence. And I think that what we possibly lose from that sense of familiarity is just how shocking and incomprehensible the case was at the time. So it is a kind of curious prediction of what the future was going to hold.”
