Compulsion

You never see the kidnap and killing of "little Pauly Koestler" in Compulsion, but this only adds to the moral horror. It is the kind of horror that comes from putting yourself in the place of a student who has treated life too academically, has experimented with a detachment that society suddenly finds repulsive.

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.

The screenplay manages to connect the reporter who discovered Judd's glasses, his girl (Diane Varsi), and the homicidal pair. Artie urges Judd to assult the girl on a bird-watching date, and this crisis recreates the conflicts of the murder ("You're not that cruel, Judd....I'm not afraid of you, I'm afraid for you"). But after the chatter between the cops, the reporter and his girl, Judd, Artie, and "Mumsie," and a destruction of the boy's alibi that has more resemblance to a college dean discovering who set off the stink-bomb in Chemistry, the movie happily surrenders to Mr. Welles.

As the defense attorney, Orson Welles manages to combine physical impressiveness with a Lincolnesque humor and humanity. "What do you plan to do about those burning crosses on your lawn?" ask the reporters.

"My feeling is that anyone who reacts to a crisis by pulling a sheet over his head isn't worth worrying about," answers the lawyer.

And thus, by the end of the film, one believes in justice and humanity again--life-imprisonment aside.