Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Based on Meyer Levin's novel about the LeopoldLoeb case, Compulsion is a well-wrought film which manages to steer around the usual stereotyped situations of college rebellion, detective work, and courtroom emotion. Primarily responsible are Dean Stockwell and Bradford Stillman as the paranoid Judd Steiner and the schizoid Artie Straus, and Orson Welles, who carries the latter part of the film on his sizeable bulk while playing the defense attorney (Clarence Darrow was responsible for life imprisonment sentences rather than the gallows for his clients...
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...
Today (NBC, 7-9 a.m.). A two-hour salute to baseball with film clips of memorable games, interviews with past and present diamond sparklers...
...film's philosophy is open to debate, its psychiatry to ridicule, but its actors are open only to ovation. Orson Welles, frazzle-pated, barrel-bellied, hollow-eyed, creates a fetching caricature of the great trial lawyer, all 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...
...minute movie called Help Wanted, made by the big (375,000 members) International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers. Its purpose: to blast General Electric Co., whose decentralization program (TIME, Jan. 12) has created heavy, if temporary, unemployment in cities where plants were shut down. The film shows troubles in Fort Wayne, Ind., Lynn, Mass. and Bloomfield, N.J. A Presbyterian minister argues: "The profit motive has destroyed the human personality." I.U.E. President James Barron Carey himself pleads for sympathy from G.E. and its shareholders...