10 Underrated Films By Amazing Directors

When he isn’t scaring the living daylights out of you with Psycho or having you descend into paranoia with The 39 Steps or even making you think twice before you enter a cornfield again with North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock was innovating and changing the face of film as we know it.

His techniques in the world of cinema are as used today as they were in the swinging '60s and his ability to create tension and suspense are still as unrivalled as they were at the time. But here, we see the culmination of all his classic techniques roll into one with 1948’s Rope. Adapted from the 1929 play of the same name by Patrick Hamilton, Rope stands as a long-dormant classic.

Now, while Alfred Hitchcock directed over fifty full-length features, it’s difficult to pick any one film as underrated, so we’ve chosen Rope as it’s possibly the best example of what Hitchcock was and what he remains today, an auteur.

What makes Rope so unique, isn’t just the filming style, but more the set-up. Shot in one continuously long-take (but for only ten cuts), the film takes place in one place, the apartment of two young men who have just killed their friend David and proceed to have a dinner party on a trunk in which their late friend’s corpse lies. Lovely.

While Rope was later described by Hitchcock as being “a stunt”, it still holds up today as a masterpiece of not only suspense, but in turn for its technical accomplishments, without Rope, we wouldn’t have films such as Birdman or: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance or Russian Ark, which have since prevailed with the techniques shown in Rope, we also wouldn’t have the hilarious Charlie Work episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia either, but that’s a different discussion.