Reviews of Compulsion, Stage & Screen
Stage
"The Theatre:
New Plays on Broadway" – Time ® Magazine – November 4, 1957
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 wantoness, killed a 14-year-old boy. There follow revelations of self-styled
supermen who had dreamed of committing the 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 dissension as danger looms, their behavior as detection
narrows; of the fantasy worlds in which both had lived. There is finally the trial, with the prosecution
flaunting the atrocious nature of the crime, and the defense the compulsive
pathology of the criminals.
The jagged, episodic
structure of Compulsion constantly stresses the factual, historical,
documentary nature of the narrative. It
no less constantly proclaims the strength of the subject matter – it's ability
to vibrate and electrify as theater – and the weakness, it's inability to widen
and deepen as drama. The cause is less
the usual documentary one, that truth tends to be formless, than that in Compulsion
truth lacks a spacious enough frame of reference.
Fredrich Hebbel, 19th
century German dramatist, perhaps put his finger on why Compulsion
fails to be large and liberating drama when he said that in a good play
everyone must seem in the right. For
the two killers this is impossible, less because of how hideous their crime is
than how gratuitous; it lacks an understandable human motive. Clinically, the crime can be explained;
given a lawless Jazz Age, two badly spoiled, rich men's sons, homosexual
neurosis and a Nietzschean intellectual arrogance and such a chemical mixture
may explode into murder-for-a-thrill.
But the case – and it's causes – remain too special to expand into
identifiable bedevilment in man's fate.
It is Grand Guignol in real life.
An impact of real-life
truthfulness Compulsion does have, often very impressively. It recapitulates just what happened, and
how, and why; it implies conscious and unconscious, willing and unwilling
behavior. There are dozens of moments
in the play with a power to inform, or shock, or dismay, that wholly shrivel
mere theatrical make-believe; and as Artie and Judd, Roddy McDowell and, even
more, Dean Stockwell, give brilliant performances. But the dozens of moments are not cumulative. Except as a history of master-and-slave
relationship, of as Artie who, devoid of normal feeling, must subsist on
diseased sensation, and a Judd slowly driven by sexual feelings into becoming
Artie's companion in evil – except, in other words, for what has happened
before Compulsion begins – it's materials permit no inner
development. Balked of psychological
progression, or even moral catharsis, Compusion can only – during its
very protracted trial scene – fall back on sociological debate. For a Clarence Darrow, defending Leopold and
Loeb, such debate was a lawyer's only weapon; in Compulsion, with
everything already stated, it becomes a weapon for hitting the audience about
three times too often over the head. So
long as it is front-page stuff (with occasional editorializing), Compulsion
on it's own terms scores. But the
full-page editorial at the end is a real mistake.
Cinema
"The New Pictures" – Time ® Magazine
– April 13, 1959
(This preface, featured
on a page before the review, was bordered by a picture of the real Loeb and
Leopold, in court, from 1924, on the top, and, 2 solo pictures, Bradford
Dillman and Dean Stockwell, from the movie, on the bottom.)
Imperfect Murder
On May 21, 1924, Leopold
and Loeb – both under 20 but already in law school – casually selected a
14-year-old victim, clubbed him, threw acid on him, drove his body across
Chicago and hid it in a culvert. Their
gory deed is not shown in Compulsion, but their confessed motives –
part thrill-seeking, part half-baked Nietzschean philosophy – are brought out
in the acting of Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman as the murderers. Planning the crime and later watching with
nervous bravado as the police draw a net of evidence around the, Stockwell and
Dillman build the tension of the film to breaking point – where it is then
resolved by Orson Welles's courtroom eloquence.
Compulsion (Zanuck Productions;
20th Century-Fox) is a terse, tense, intelligent melodramatization of "the
crime of the century": the
Leopold-Loeb case of 1924. Richard
Murphy's screenplay borrows many of it's keenest scenes from Meyer Levin's
Broadway version of his own best-selling 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.
Judd Steiner and Artie
Straus (fictional names for Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb) are wealthy,
brilliant young law students at the University of Chicago. Straus-Loeb, as portrayed by Bradford
Dillamn, is the spoiled-rotten son of a socialite mother. At 18, he is 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 gentile 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 superior intellect". So they
kidnap a 14-year-old schoolboy name Paulie Kessler (fictional name for Bobby Franks),
cosh-kill him in the back of a rented care, and dump the body in a
culvert. Remorse? Artie seems incapable of human feeling. But thoughtful, sensitive Judd protests too
much: "Murder's nothing! It's just a simple experience. What's one life more or less?"
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 it's 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?" he cries. "Any cry for more goes back to the
hyena." *
The film's philosophy is
open to debate, it's psychiatry to ridicule, but it's actions 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 fiend. But it is Dean Stockwell as Steiner-Leopold,
who dominates the drama. His intensity
and insight do much to exploit the character's homosexuality, do something to
clarify his fearful crime.
*Life they got. Loeb was killed (TIME, Feb. 10, 1926) in Statesville
Prison in a razor fight that apparently started with a homosexual assault. Leopold was paroled last year (TIME, March
14, 1958) at the age of 53, is now working as a laboratory technician in a
Puerto Rico hospital.
The End