Who played Rupert Cadell in Hitchcock's Rope?

Who played Rupert Cadell in Hitchcock’s Rope? The answer is James Stewart.

James Stewart plays Rupert Cadell, the sophisticated former publisher and philosophical mentor of the two young murderers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan believe Cadell’s earlier discussions of intellectual superiority have helped justify their crime, but his arrival gradually exposes the weakness of their ideas.

Released in 1948, Rope was adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 stage play, with a screenplay by Arthur Laurents. Hitchcock and his collaborators designed the film to appear to unfold in real time, using unusually long takes joined together to simulate a continuous shot. It was also Hitchcock’s first film made in Technicolor.

The cast is sometimes confused because John Dall and Farley Granger play the killers, while Stewart plays the older mentor who becomes suspicious. Stewart had already established himself as a major star, but Rope gave him a darker, more morally probing role than many of his earlier films. The story was loosely connected to the real-life Leopold and Loeb murder case.