Word: levins
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Compulsion. Despite some debatable philosophy and psychiatry, Meyer Levin's casebook on the 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder makes taut, adult melodrama...
Compulsion. Meyer Levin's bestselling casebook of "The Crime of the Century," the Leopold-Loeb murder case of 1924, makes a tense, intelligent melodrama...
There remains only Old Skipps, the rag and bones man who rises drunkly from the would-be dead to bring down the house with laughter and send the lovers home. And Barry Levin is a convincing drunk. And the play is convincingly optimistic...
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...
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...