This classy Fox production was considered the epitome of sick film subject matter in the pre- Psycho year of 1959, the true story of jazz-age thrill killers Leopold & Loeb. Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman are the nihilistic child murderers; Orson Welles stops the show with his portrayal of Clarence Darrow, going under a different name.
Compulsion
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1959 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date March 7, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Orson Welles, Dean Stockwell, Diane Varsi, Bradford Dillman, E.G. Marshall, Richard Anderson, Robert F. Simon, Edward Binns, Gavid McLeod, Russ Bender, Peter Brocco.
Cinematography: William C. Mellor
Film Editor: William Reynolds
Original Music: Lionel Newman
Written by Richard Murphy from a novel by Meyer Levin
Produced by Richard D. Zanuck
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Movies about serial killers and psychos with exotic agendas were much different before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which hit America in 1960 like a thrown brick.
Compulsion
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1959 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date March 7, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Orson Welles, Dean Stockwell, Diane Varsi, Bradford Dillman, E.G. Marshall, Richard Anderson, Robert F. Simon, Edward Binns, Gavid McLeod, Russ Bender, Peter Brocco.
Cinematography: William C. Mellor
Film Editor: William Reynolds
Original Music: Lionel Newman
Written by Richard Murphy from a novel by Meyer Levin
Produced by Richard D. Zanuck
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Movies about serial killers and psychos with exotic agendas were much different before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which hit America in 1960 like a thrown brick.
- 3/12/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
(1959, 12, Second Sight)
As a student in the 1930s, Richard Fleischer switched from medicine to drama and later, between skilful genre movies and historical blockbusters, he directed four remarkable studies of famous, real-life murderers, all male, all insane : The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), Compulsion, The Boston Strangler (1968) and 10 Rillington Place (1971). Unlike the others, Compulsion is in black and white and adapted from a novel by Meyer Levin, but despite changing the characters' names and inventing some subsidiary figures, it sticks closely to the notorious 1924 case of Nathan Leopold (Dean Stockwell) and Richard Loeb (Bradford Dillman). Brilliant University of Chicago graduate students from wealthy Jewish families, they murdered a 14-year-old schoolboy as a way of establishing their indifference as Nietzschean supermen to conventional morality. Orson Welles dominates the film as Clarence Darrow, the great liberal attorney who defended them, his flowery 12-hour speech reduced to 10 minutes. The same case...
As a student in the 1930s, Richard Fleischer switched from medicine to drama and later, between skilful genre movies and historical blockbusters, he directed four remarkable studies of famous, real-life murderers, all male, all insane : The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), Compulsion, The Boston Strangler (1968) and 10 Rillington Place (1971). Unlike the others, Compulsion is in black and white and adapted from a novel by Meyer Levin, but despite changing the characters' names and inventing some subsidiary figures, it sticks closely to the notorious 1924 case of Nathan Leopold (Dean Stockwell) and Richard Loeb (Bradford Dillman). Brilliant University of Chicago graduate students from wealthy Jewish families, they murdered a 14-year-old schoolboy as a way of establishing their indifference as Nietzschean supermen to conventional morality. Orson Welles dominates the film as Clarence Darrow, the great liberal attorney who defended them, his flowery 12-hour speech reduced to 10 minutes. The same case...
- 10/9/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
The New York Times has confirmed that Broadway vet Mandy Patinkin will star in the new play about a man's obsession with the diary of Anne Frank by Rinne Groff, currently titled Compulsion. The play will make its premiere at Yale Repertory Theater next year. Patinkin will reportedly star as a character inspired by Meyer Levin, the journalist and screenwriter who assisted in publicizing the existence of the diary, and who believed that the opportunity to turn it into a play had been stolen from him.
- 10/7/2009
- BroadwayWorld.com
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