The apartment set showed up the following year, slightly re-furbished, in the Doris Day movie My Dream Is Yours.
The film was banned in a number of American cities because of the implied homosexuality of Phillip (Farley Granger) and Brandon (John Dall).
The film was shot in ten takes, ranging from four-and-a-half to just over ten minutes (the maximum amount of film that a camera magazine or projector reel could hold) duration. At the end of the takes, the film alternates between having the camera zoom into a dark object, totally blacking out the lens/screen, and making a conventional cut. However, the second edit, ostensibly one of the conventional ones, was clearly staged and shot to block the camera, but the all-black frames were left out of the final print. Most of the props, and even some of the apartment set's walls, were on casters and the crew had to wheel them out of the way and back into position as the camera moved around the set.
The film was unavailable for decades because its rights (together with four other pictures of the same period) were bought back by Alfred Hitchcock and left as part of his legacy to his daughter Patricia Hitchcock. They've been known for long as the infamous "5 lost Hitchcocks" amongst film buffs, and were re-released in theatres around 1984 after a 30-year absence. The others are The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry, and Vertigo.
The picture was filmed entirely in-studio (except for the opening credits). The clouds that you see out the window are made out of fiberglass. For the effect of a police siren coming towards the apartment building at the end, Alfred Hitchcock had an ambulance come at full speed, from several blocks away, straight to the Warner Brothers studio, siren blaring all the way. The sounds were picked up by a microphone suspended from the studio gate.
The play, originally entitled "Rope" when it premiered in London, was re-titled "Rope's End" when it went to Broadway. The Broadway play "Rope's End" opened on Sept. 19, 1929 at the Theatre Masque (now called the John Golden Theatre) and ran for 100 performances.
The screenwriter Arthur Laurents claimed that originally Hitchcock assured him the movie wouldn't show the murder itself, therefore creating doubt as to whether the two leading characters actually committed murder and whether the trunk had a corpse inside.
The star signs that Mrs Atwater states for the movie actors she discusses are in each case correct: James Mason really was a Taurus, Cary Grant a Capricorn, and Ingrid Bergman a Virgo, just as she says.
The theatrical trailer features footage shot specifically for the advertisement that takes place before the beginning of the movie. David (the victim) sits on a park bench and speaks with Janet before leaving to meet Brandon and Phillip. James Stewart narrates the sequence, noting that's the last time Janet and the audience would see him alive.
This was the only movie James Stewart made with Alfred Hitchcock that he did not like. Stewart later admitted he felt he was badly miscast as the investigator (he makes his first entrance 28 minutes into the film).
When Janet and Mrs. Atwater are discussing their favorite leading men in movies, they bring up Cary Grant, and how brilliant he was in "that new thing with (Ingrid) Bergman." Neither can recall the title, but it's just plain "something" (meaning only one word). This refers to Alfred Hitchcock's earlier movie, Notorious. Grant had also been Hitchcock's first choice for the role of Rupert Cadell.
Alfred Hitchcock:
His profile appears on a neon sign visible through the apartment window approximately 55 minutes into the movie. The neon sign advertises "Reduco," the same fictional weight-loss product that Hitchcock advertised in his famous newspaper ad cameo in Lifeboat. Some sources indicate that he also appears walking down the street during the opening credits.