***Out In The 1950s Film Noir Night-Compulsion

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Compulsion, starring Bradford Dillman, Dean Stockwell, Orson Welles, directed by Richard Fleischer, 1959

The Jazz Age, the time, the decade or so, right after the war, World War I one if anybody is asking, was a weird time in America in some respects. That was the careless, crime-ridden “war on alcohol” age made famous by the like of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, especially the latter for his take on American upward mobility with his unforgettable character Jay Ganz trying to climb up the social anyway he could, no matter the body count, in The Great Gatsby. Of course that was fiction, fiction though that cut to the core, cut to the core like the film under review, Compulsion, was fiction although based on the infamous actions of Leopold and Loeb in Chicago in the 1920s.

Apparently our fictionalized lead characters here, Artie and Judd, two young men, boys really, from wealthy Chicago circumstances had spent too much of their spare time reading too many German philosophers, too much Nietzsche, too seriously, especially those interested in creating a society led by “supermen,” the elite guided by no other criterion except pure rationality. No emotional attachments need apply. And to prove that thesis, to try it out in practice, the pair crudely bludgeon some kid in park and depose of him in culvert after kidnapping him. They assume after such heroics that they have passed beyond the pale of mere mortals and have proven their superiority point. Except for the little problem of those damn glasses that Judd somehow left behind at the crime scene and that did them in posthaste. So from supermen they turned into, well, low- life cellmates in a trial for their lives.

While the drama here is driven for a while by trying to corral the pair, trying to dissect their weird motivations, the real claim to fame of this film should be as a rather powerful argument against the death penalty. Certainly the heinous crime they committed was in another age death-penalty worthy but as powerfully articulated by Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles), as their attorney, that barbaric form of punishment did nothing to deter the mad, the crazy and the socially isolated and offended against our evolving standard of civility. And so powerful was Mister Wilk’s presentation that the judge actually gave both men life sentences. Life sentences to stew in their own juices over their views of the word and maybe change their perspectives around mere mortals. And those hardened inmates at Joliet will see to that.