“What was curious to me was that ROPE was obviously about homosexuals. The word was never mentioned. Not by Hitch, not by anyone at Warners. It was referred to as ‘it’. They were going to do a picture about ‘it’ and the actors were ‘it’”. - Arthur Laurents, screenwriter of Rope

Though we'll never truly know which team(s) the Master of Suspense was playing for, one thing is for sure; Hitchcock had a career-long interest in queer characters, tiptoeing around the Hays Code with skill and panache. FOND OF HIS MOTHER: QUEER-CODED HITCHCOCK celebrates some of his greatest achievements in this realm. From the overt, pulpy, and brilliant broad strokes of PSYCHO & STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, to the sensual and stunning painterly precision of ROPE & REBECCA — Hitch stands out from his contemporaries with these four nuanced, and deeply fascinating explorations of myriad queer-coded characters existing within worlds that prefer to pretend they don't exist