Word: crimeds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Compulsion (Zanuck Productions; 20th Century-Fox) is a terse, tense, intelligent melodramatization of "the crime of the century": the Leopold-Loeb murder case of 1924. Richard Murphy's screenplay borrows many of its keenest scenes from Meyer Levin's Broadway version of his own bestselling casebook of the crime (TIME, Nov. 12, 1956), preserves in the film (103 minutes) all the essential details of the play (180 minutes), eliminates only a few of the far-out psychiatric references. One important addition: a taut sense of dramatic sequence...
...kind of folie à deux, the boys resolve "to explore all the possibilities of human experience," to pluck the most exotic flowers of evil. Murder, Artie decides, is the only thing that will satisfy his compulsion "to do something really dangerous," and Judd loyally approves "the perfect crime" as "the true test of the superior intellect." So they kidnap a 14-year-old schoolboy named Paulie Kessler (fictional name for Bobby Franks), cosh-kill him in the back of a rented car, and dump the body in a culvert. Remorse? Artie seems incapable of human feeling. But thoughtful, sensitive Judd...
Soon, of course, the perfect crime collapses into a heap of all-too-human, even childish errors-Judd was so rattled that he dropped his spectacles beside the body of the victim. The boys are questioned, tricked into confession, ordered to trial...
Abruptly, at this point, the character of the film changes. The first 60 minutes add up to a clever psychological thriller, marked and sometimes marred by solemn efforts to see the crime in its social and spiritual setting-as a single pustule in a larger leprosy. The trial, arguing from this evidence, swiftly develops an eloquent though somewhat overextended plea for the abolition of the death penalty. The film rises to a memorable peroration in the words of Clarence Darrow (Orson Welles), as he asks the court to temper justice with mercy, sentence his clients to life in prison. "Life...
...fustian and a yard wide. Bradford Dillman, the Straus-Loeb, is alarmingly screw loose and frenzy free. But it is Dean Stockwell, as Steiner-Leopold, who dominates the drama. His intensity and insight do much to explain the character's homosexuality, do something to clarify his fearful crime...