This Alfred Hitchcock experiment remains important as that: an experiment. It is a reasonably good film, but not up to his usual standards. The experiment was to give the illusion of one long take, instead of using editing for continuity. The film consists of eight 10-minute takes, with the edits between them concealed by tricky camera work. Not very tricky, mind you: usually, the camera will run into someone's back and then pull away, making the "invisible" edits as obvious, or more so, than traditional editing. I think it is a failed experiment, really. The supposedly invisible editing is more of a distraction than being really innovative, and the idea that 81 minutes in anybody's life is interesting enough to show all of it without takes is simply incorrect, even if they have just committed a murder and are trying to conceal it from party guests.

The film is based on the infamous Leopold and Loeb murders, in which two University of Chicago (my employer!) Lab School brats murder a colleague, both to commit "the perfect murder" and to prove their theories that it is acceptable for certain people in society, namely, people like them, to murder their lessers. The dominant friend, played by John Dall, is more of an elitist, and he picked up some of his ideas, or at least found a sympathetic ear, from a college professor played by James Stewart. The more effeminate friend, played by Farley Granger, The duo are ambiguously homosexual; they have a certain affected manner that, in 1948, meant homosexuality to viewers, although it is simply implied in the film. After murdering their friend, they stow his body in a trunk and give a dinner party, to which they invite his parents and fiancee. To complete their joke on the world and to show off their superiority, they serve dinner from atop the trunk that holds the body. It is a game to them: they committed the perfect murder, and they are gleefully showing off to their unwitting guests.

Much of the film is quite tense. Dall prances around, proud of himself, while Granger slowly loses it. He wasn't really excited about the idea—he has a conscience, while Granger does not—and he feels great guilt and fear. He quickly drinks himself into a devastating stupor, thereby losing what control he had over his emotions. Meanwhile, Dall seems content to defer any questions about the friend's disappearance and cover for his accomplice's state.

The guests include the victim's girlfriend (Joan Chandler), his father (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), another friend who used to date Collier (Douglas Dick), and their old college professor. Stewart, as the reprehensible man who helped instill the ideas that led to the murder, is a little hard to take in his bad guy role. You didn't see a lot of casting against type like this in the 1940s. Especially difficult is a scene in which he and Dall argue with Hardwicke about whether murder would be acceptable in certain situations. Gradually, though, Stewart comes to suspect something, and slowly wears away at Granger's fragile resolve. The perfect crime begins to unravel.

I had a real problem with the ending. If you haven't seen the film, you may want to stop reading now. Stewart, upon discovering the body in the trunk, gives a rambling and inconsistent (with his own professed values) speech about how wrong it was for the boys to kill their friend. This, unfortunately, comes off much the same as it would for Hitler to have said, "Hey, I didn't think anyone would act on what I was saying. I was just philosophizing." Stewart helped create the monsters who strangled their friend and stashed him in a trunk, and his moralizing at the end comes off as tinny and false.