The murder committed in the 1920s by two young men, Leopold & Loeb, has been story fodder for years. There was, of course, Hitchcock's ROPE, the independent film SWOON, and a musical, THRILL ME, which recently played at the York Theater in New York.
This version stars Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman as the killers who believed that they were supermen as described by Nietzsche. Though their homosexuality can only be hinted at, it's pretty apparent. Stockwell likes Dillman to order him to do things, and at the beginning, the Dillman character orders him to run someone over. He does it. They move on to kidnapping and murder next. They have no emotional attachment to their crime, no sense of morality, and no remorse. As brilliant as they believed they were, they're caught pretty quickly. Clarence Darrow is brought in to defend them. They get a life sentence instead of death by hanging. Loeb was murdered by another inmate in 1936; Leopold died in 1971. The two remained very much attached to one another.
"Compulsion" is a fictionalized version of this story. Though set in the '20s, it somehow has a modern feel to it - perhaps it was the dialogue, the demeanor of the young men, but I never bought for a single second that we were in the '20s. The cast is uniformly excellent. Bradford Dillman is sharp, cocky, energetic, and totally unlikeable as "Arthur Strauss," the brains of the operation, and Dean Stockwell is excellent as the submissive genius Judd. E.G. Marshall plays the district attorney, and Martin Milner gives a good performance as a reporter. Diane Varsi is Milner's love interest who takes pity on Judd. She is not very effective.
Orson Welles shows up as the Darrow character, renamed here as Wilk, toward the middle of the film. He gives a powerful performance and has a huge speech to the judge at the end. Apparently, Welles only cooperated up to a point. Everything was fine until the IRS took his salary. He left before the looping for the film was finished, and the director, Richard Fleischer, had to put the missing part of the speech together from other parts of the movie, using words and even syllables. Welles was probably as detached from "Compulsion" as the characters were to their crime, but he has the technical ability to be very convincing in his role.
"Compulsion" is an unsavory story, but the acting is good and the film won awards at Cannes. It's worth watching.
This version stars Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman as the killers who believed that they were supermen as described by Nietzsche. Though their homosexuality can only be hinted at, it's pretty apparent. Stockwell likes Dillman to order him to do things, and at the beginning, the Dillman character orders him to run someone over. He does it. They move on to kidnapping and murder next. They have no emotional attachment to their crime, no sense of morality, and no remorse. As brilliant as they believed they were, they're caught pretty quickly. Clarence Darrow is brought in to defend them. They get a life sentence instead of death by hanging. Loeb was murdered by another inmate in 1936; Leopold died in 1971. The two remained very much attached to one another.
"Compulsion" is a fictionalized version of this story. Though set in the '20s, it somehow has a modern feel to it - perhaps it was the dialogue, the demeanor of the young men, but I never bought for a single second that we were in the '20s. The cast is uniformly excellent. Bradford Dillman is sharp, cocky, energetic, and totally unlikeable as "Arthur Strauss," the brains of the operation, and Dean Stockwell is excellent as the submissive genius Judd. E.G. Marshall plays the district attorney, and Martin Milner gives a good performance as a reporter. Diane Varsi is Milner's love interest who takes pity on Judd. She is not very effective.
Orson Welles shows up as the Darrow character, renamed here as Wilk, toward the middle of the film. He gives a powerful performance and has a huge speech to the judge at the end. Apparently, Welles only cooperated up to a point. Everything was fine until the IRS took his salary. He left before the looping for the film was finished, and the director, Richard Fleischer, had to put the missing part of the speech together from other parts of the movie, using words and even syllables. Welles was probably as detached from "Compulsion" as the characters were to their crime, but he has the technical ability to be very convincing in his role.
"Compulsion" is an unsavory story, but the acting is good and the film won awards at Cannes. It's worth watching.