Word: novel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Compulsion (dramatized from Meyer Levin's novel) re-enacts, exhaustively and explicitly, one of the grisliest horror stories of the century-the Loeb-Leopold murder case. Told in 20 scenes and lasting some three and a half hours, Compulsion begins just after two young homosexuals have, with long-calculated wantonness, killed a 14-year-old boy. There follow revelations of self-styled supermen who had dreamed of committing a perfect crime; of gay, violent, vicious Artie Straus (Richard Loeb) and his "superior slave," Judd Steiner (Nathan Leopold); of how imperfect a crime the two had actually committed; of their...
Monique (by Dorothy and Michael Blankfort) is a child of the same French novel-The Woman Who Was No More -as the film Diabolique. The two are by no means twins, however. In the stage chiller, when Fernand Ravinel's wife refuses to dissolve their unhappy marriage through divorce, his doctor-mistress Monique suggests dissolving it through murder. As the efficient Monique drowns the wife in a bathtub and then makes her appear to drown in a stream-a Lady Macbeth superintending an Ophelia's fale -a scared Fernand quivers like jelly and wobbles like a tenpin...
...Story of Esther Costello (Romulus; Columbia) examines the phony charity racket. Following the lead of Nicholas Monsarrat's novel, on which it is based, the picture not only condemns the conscious criminals but also takes a number of lusty sideswipes at their unconscious accomplices: public sentimentality and crassness, official indifference, and the self-righteous complaisance of religious groups...
...title taken from a 1955 speech by Khrushchev: ''We will abandon Communism when the shrimp learns to whistle.'' According to scientists shrimps are actually highly vocal (one, the Pistol Prawn, makes a noise like a cap pistol). Says one Grinioff character slyly at the novel's final party: "They whistle all the time-but only for each other...
...whole "novel" should have been released slowly through quarterlies. In small doses, the stuff might still be good for a few kicks when you've run out of juice. Too much is too much, man, no matter what brand you're drinking. There's a difference between having IT and being sick...