In Jesse Green’s 2009 New York profile of the late playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents, Laurents briefly discusses Rope, the 1948 Alfred Hitchcock thriller. Laurents adapted Patrick Hamilton‘s 1929 play for the screen.
Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan, the Leopold and Loeb-like main characters who’ve strangled a young acquaintance, are gay, of course, and are respectively played by gay actors, John Dall and Farley Granger.
But Laurents tells Green that James Stewart‘s Rupert Cadell, an advocate of Nietzschean notions of selective superiority who inspired the strangling, was gay also, although Laurents’ hints to this effect were so subtle that Stewart probably didn’t realize what they amounted to.
I should be included. Before reading Green’s article last night I’d never even flirted with the idea of Cadell being “musical.”