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In 1948, Alfred Hitchcock directed a film adaptation of English playwright Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play Rope, which was based on the 1924 murder of 14-year old Bobby Franks by University of Chicago graduate students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

In Hamilton’s play, two university students in Mayfair, London kill a fellow student as an intellectual exercise in philosophical amorality. They then host a dinner party for the victim’s friends and family with the body stashed in a chest they’re using as a buffet. For the film version, the murder and subsequent dinner party take place in a New York City penthouse shared by the murderers.

The play presented the killers as being in a relationship. But the film was produced in the era of the Hays Code, which prohibited any depiction of sexual perversion, which absolutely included homosexuality. So the relationship, while clearly implied, was never stated explicitly.

Subject matter aside, it was a pretty gay production.

The killers were played by John Dall and Farley Granger, who were both gay. Granger was in a relationship with Arthur Laurents, who wrote the screenplay. The play was adapted by actor and writer Hume Cronyn, whose first marriage was a “lavender marriage” to a lesbian philanthropist and theater patron named Emily Woodruff. And Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy the original killers followed, was also reputed to be gay.

Because the entire action of the film takes place over one evening in one location, Hitchcock experimented with the use of long takes and creative editing to make it appear almost play-like. The film was not well received upon its release, and the actors were generally polite in their descriptions of the experience filming it. Over time, though, it’s come to be considered a classic.

Leopold and Loeb

On May 21, 1924, Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, who were both graduate students at the University of Chicago and in a relationship, kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks as an intellectual exercise. Believers in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch concept, they felt that their superior intellect not only made them capable of committing the perfect crime, but entitled them to do so without consequence. They spent seven months planning the murder, which took the police just seven days to solve.

On the advice of their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, of Monkey Trial fame, Leopold and Loeb pleaded guilty to their crime in the hopes of avoiding the death penalty. During a 32-day sentencing hearing, the prosecution labelled them perverts and presented homosexuality as the motive for the crime. Darrow argued that their relationship was evidence of insanity, arguably not better. He also claimed their families’ abundant wealth was a mitigating circumstance in their amorality.

Darrow took the case specifically for the opportunity to argue against the death penalty in open court, which he did for eight straight hours during his summation. Objective achieved, both Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life + 99 years in prison. Loeb was murdered in prison at 30. Leopold was paroled after serving 33 years, and died of a heart attack at 66.