Alfred Hitchcock stages this experimental thriller as a single unbroken take (achieved through carefully hidden cuts), following two young men, played by John Dall and Farley Granger, who strangle a classmate to prove their intellectual superiority and then host a dinner party with the body hidden in plain sight. James Stewart plays their former professor whose growing suspicion threatens to unravel their perfect crime. Loosely inspired by the real Leopold and Loeb murder case, it remains a landmark of formal daring in Hitchcock's filmography.