Word: evilness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dramatically, the film divides in two. Judd and Artie are pictured in their furtive and bumbling friendship--Judd much the more attractive of the two, because of his curious morality of anti-morality ("I tell you evil is beautiful"). Judd becomes a kind of ignoble Hamlet, a boy of "superior intellect" ill-adapted to a slick world of Stutz-Bearcats, bootlegged gin, and flappers. Artie, who dares him on, commands less sympathy, but lends a certain amount of humor in his badgering of the police and elaborately contrived lying...
...Brotherhood of Evil, Sondern...
Whatever they may do or leave undone about their Negro brethren, most U.S. churches hold that all men are equal before God. One notable exception: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Book of Mormon teaches that the colored races are descendants of the evil children of Laman and Lemuel, who impiously warred against the good children of Nephi and received their pigmented skin as punishment. Last week a Utah State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights drew on this Mormon scripture in a scathing report on the state of the tiny nonwhite minority...
...already a vicious little sadist. Steiner-Leopold, as Dean Stockwell interprets him, is a motherless young genius whose IQ is too high to be measured by any known intelligence test-essentially a gentle boy who has been completely mesmerized by the animal magnetism of his evil companion. Straus-Loeb is the superman, Steiner-Leopold the "superior slave" in a private world of post-Nietzschean fantasy and homosexual practice...
Carried away by a 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...