Compulsión

The real-life Leopold-Loeb murder case, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope," among other films, is the basis for this story of a couple of rich young men committing a murder just for the thrill of trying to pull off the perfect crime. Stockwell and Dillman are well cast as the cold-blooded killers. The first half of the film, focusing on the strange relationship between the two men, their crime, and their arrest, is quite interesting. Then Welles shows up as the defense attorney and the film loses momentum. Welles seems to be sleep-walking through this one, and his final speech seems to take up about a third of the film.

Leopold was paroled after years of being a model prisoner, planning all kinds of prison reforms, and when released did philanthropic work in Puerto Rico. Interesting that Meyer Levin, author of book on which this film is based said, this amazingly redeemed man just a few times gave Levin a chill as it became clear that this character of 'St. Leopold' was just another creation of a true psychopath. The mocking narcissistic smirk was still there under it all.

In that actual murder case, two college students who happen to be geniuses decide that the rules don't apply to the superior intellect, and they murder some random child just for the experience, having planned the details out carefully. But since I am writing about this, apparently it was not careful enough.

All of the details of the murder case are pretty accurate, but there are fictional characters installed because this is more of a character study than a historically accurate account. These two fictional characters are Sid (Martin Milner) a college student and newspaper reporter, and his girlfriend Ruth (Diane Varsi).

Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell) is a rough equivalent to Leopold. Arthur Straus (Bradford Dillman) is a rough equivalent to Loeb. This is still the 1950s, so the production code wouldn't allow you to just come out and say what is going on between the two of them, but the film does as good a job as it can of portraying Steiner as in love with Straus, although the film has Arthur/Artie as being the one who wants to indulge in all of the criminal behavior with Judd mainly going along so he can keep Artie close to him. In fact it was Leopold/Steiner who was the instigator of all of the crimes that led up to murder. Instead, Steiner is portrayed as a timid guy alienated from his family who would have probably just been a self involved loner with weird hobbies if not for the bad influence of Straus. In fact, I think Ruth is in this film just to insinuate that Steiner "liked" girls more than she is there as a girlfriend for the all American student journalist, Sid.

It's actually a pretty good look at what criminal investigators had to work with 100 years ago before there was DNA - identifying a typewriter from a ransom note, and being able to trace one pair of glasses out of thousands like it down to the person who owned them. As for interviews, before "you have the right to remain silent" was part of the police procedural vernacular, the smart investigator wants to keep the suspect talking - if he is guilty eventually he will trip himself up. Bright lights, billy clubs, and brutality are not required.

Although Orson Wells doesn't appear on screen until halfway through the film, he dominates the conclusion. His character, John Wilk, is based on Clarence Darrow who was probably the most famous defense attorney in the country during the early 1900s. He is faced with the difficult task of preventing two rich kids with every advantage who killed a child for the thrill of it all from going to the gallows.

If "Compulsion" is still such a powerful film is, totally, Dean Stockwell's merit. What a sensational actor! I'm writing this the day after the announcement of Dennis Hopper's death and while I was looking for a Dennis Hopper movie to watch a came across "Compulsion" Not Hopper but Stockwell and I settled for that anyway. I was riveted by Stockwell's performance because everyone else (with the natural exception of Orson Wells and E G Marshall) seems so dated and acted that Dean's every moment is sheer magic. He doesn't shy away from the awfulness but makes his young monster totally human, provoking in us that element that Orson Welles's closing argument tries to bring to the forefront. If you love great acting, you can't afford to miss Dean Stockwell in "Compulsion"

We can add Welles to Wilde, Monroe and others who we never respected until they were gone. His pleading for the lives of those crazy boys (as Clarence Darrow did) is an eloquent plea for the ending of the death penalty. Funny, how a barometer like the death penalty tells us so much about a society's relative civility. The US had backed away from it, but is now swinging back toward even public executions (which I would much prefer, as they show all of us how barbaric we have become).

Note that the movie dwells on their 'craziness' and 'richness', not the Jewishness or the homosexual relationships that evoked the wrath of the public in the real case. Both Dillman and Dean Stockwell do an excellent job of drawing out your anger until you find yourself one of the mob yelling for blood. To stem the tide, in comes Orson Welles. Welles' phrasing and meaningful looks struck me again with what a magnificent actor he was, as well as director.

Now I have to go read 'Compulsion', the novel around which this movie was made, to determine what was left out and if it would have contributed to some of the obviously omitted details that make this movie a little choppy. This movie performs the task that great art must take on itself: to provide us insights into life and how it should be lived. That can be done either negatively or positively, by point or counter-point.

Of course, unless you had some excellent writers and actors of the stature of Welles, you wouldn't come up to the quality of this movie. Definitely, black and white contributed to the brooding quality of the film. Color would have detracted, and you'll seldom 'hear' me say this.