Compulsion

Studio: Kino Lorber Studio Classics

Mar 27, 2017 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

Based on a 1956 novel of the same name, Compulsion is a fictionalized version of the 1924 case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy Chicago teenagers who murdered a fourteen-year-old boy in order to commit “the perfect crime” and to prove their inherent intellectual superiority. The pair were defended by famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose twelve-hour closing remarks are credited with transforming the American outlook on capital punishment.

Dubbed “the crime of the century” by contemporary observers, the case of Leopold and Loeb had already been dramatized by Hollywood prior to Compulsion. The most notable interpretation was made in 1948 by Alfred Hitchcock, who utilized the broad premise of the crime to create his heavily fictionalized, one-take drawing room murder mystery, Rope. Compulsion, released by 20^th Century Fox in the spring of 1959, approaches the case from a true-crime perspective, creating a sprawling – by the standards of a 100-minute movie – tapestry of the murders’ motivations, the police investigation, newspaper reporting on the case, and the trial itself. The jazzy score and casual depiction of the speakeasy nightlife enjoyed by wealthy teens of the 1920s keeps the film distinct and immersive, despite the production subbing Los Angeles for Chicago. This verisimilitude is given a major assist by the razor-sharp 4K restoration on Kino Lorber’s new blu-ray edition of the film.

Produced in the waning days of the studio system when creators were beginning to buck against self-imposed Hollywood censorship and the roots of the grindhouse genre were beginning to form, Compulsion hides some hints at the darker future of cinema beneath its prestigious studio veneer. The opening titles are presented in a thick, lurid font over the sound of hot, staccato jazz. Judd Steiner – the Leopold analog played by Dean Stockwell – shares an obsession with stuffed birds that would be recycled as a red flag just one year later with Norman Bates in Psycho. The homosexual undertones between the two killers, only hinted at in Hitchcock’s Rope a decade earlier, become somewhat more overt here, with Bradford Dillman’s Artie Strauss explicitly discussing his dominance of Steiner and several scenes framing them as though they’re about to kiss.

Dillman’s performance as the glib, attention-craving Strauss is the most compelling in the film, humorous and engaging while also possessing a genuine menace. As a rich brat spouting Nietzschean nonsense about his inherent superiority, a line practically traces itself from him to Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and straight on through to various all-too-real alt-right figures poisoning contemporary political discourse. Although Dillman and Stockwell play the two protagonists and give strong performances, top-billing on Compulsion went to Orson Welles for his role as Jonathan Wilk, the Clarence Darrow stand-in who defends the boys out of a principled stand against capital punishment. Welles does not arrive on screen until over an hour into the film and shot his entire role in ten days. Despite being less than two decades removed from his history-making debut in Citizen Kane at the age of twenty-six, Welles had already begun his slide into curmudgeonly obesity when he made Compulsion. As Wilk, Welles curbs his typically explosive personality to give a quiet, sad performance as a man who knows he’s defending monsters for a greater good. His disheveled, sweaty presence and interiority makes for an excellent bait-and-switch in his show-stopping final scene, an abbreviated but deeply moving interpretation of Darrow’s indictment of capital punishment.

In addition to the sterling 4K transfer and sound, the Kino Lorber release of Compulsion also includes a comprehensive and engaging commentary track by film historian Tim Lucas, as well as trailers for The Stranger, also starring Welles and several others for films directed by Richard Fleischer.

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