I first saw Compulsion on the late, late show on KGSC-TV in San Jose hosted by car dealer J Brown. He was a Southern transplant who spoke in a dulcet drawl about his affection for old movies and his audience who he called night people. Brown’s host segments were soft sell; he left the hard sell for his commercials starring the Price Slasher who was “hackin’ and hewin” at the dollar sign.

It’s now a Honda dealership. The Price Slasher is nowhere to be found on their web site. Oh well, what the hell.

That concludes this stroll down memory lane. I can’t call you night people because this feature lands in the morning. Let’s get to the movie.

Thanks to Compulsion, I’ve had a lifelong interest in the Leopold-Loeb murder case. They were the two “boy geniuses” who thought they could plan the perfect murder and fool the cops because they were smarter. They did not and were not. They thought they were Nietzschean supermen when they were just rich kids who had everything except parental attention.

If you don’t know much about the Leopold-Loeb case, here’s a CBS Sunday Morning piece to fill you in:

Compulsion is based on the novel and play of the same name by Meyer Levin. It’s a thinly fictionalized take on the so-called thrill killers:

The Leopold like character is played by Dean Stockwell. The Loeb guy by Bradford Dillman. Both actors excelled in the roles as did Orson Welles as Jonathan Wilk who was based on Clarence Darrow who defended the real defendants. He pled them guilty and made an impassioned argument against the death penalty. It worked IRL and onscreen.

Every time I hear about child stars gone haywire, I use Dean Stockwell as a counter-example. He had a long acting career including a comeback in the 1980’s thanks to David Lynch.

Dillman muddled along in character roles and was always good but never as good as in Compulsion.

Leopold and Loeb were gay. Leopold fantasized about being Loeb’s slave boy. The movie deals with this obliquely, instead emphasizing Dillman-Loeb’s dominance over his fellow boy genius. The gay aspect of the story is covered by the 1992 movie Swoon, which I’ve seen but not recently enough to grade.

Alfred Hitchcock also took a whack at the Leopold and Loeb story in 1948’s Rope with Farley Granger and John Dall as the thrill killers. It’s best known for its single shot gimmickry. I give it 3 stars and an Adrastos grade of B. It’s lesser Hitchcock that didn’t make the Alfred Hitchcock Dozen.

I don’t feel the need to do a more detailed description of the plot. The broad outlines have been sketched and this feature is called pulp fiction, not pulp spoilers.

Compulsion is artfully directed by Richard Fleischer with a fine script by Richard Murphy. I mentioned the three principal actors earlier. The rest of the cast is first rate and includes Diane Varsi, Martin Milner, and EG Marshall as the prosecutor. Marshall specialized in playing lawyers, the snootier the better.

That looks like Donald Trump’s dream jury: It’s all middle aged white guys. Oy, just oy.

Grading Time: I give Compulsion 3 1/2 stars and an Adrastos grade of B+. There are a bewildering array of versions on the YouTube. I can’t vouch for any of them: I watched it on Amazon Prime.

I feel compelled to post some posters.

Here are the American and Italian long sheets side-by-side.

Holy dogeared images, Batman. The glasses are the film’s MacGuffin. Stockwell-Leopold left them at the scene of the crime.

It would be a crime to skip posting a quad:

I feel a sudden compulsion to visit the lobby for a thrill.

Like Becker and Fagen, I couldn’t buy a thrill, so I looked at the lobby cards instead. It’s your turn to do likewise.

Let’s exit the courtroom and board the trailer:

This post opened unusually, the same can be said of the ending. The last word goes to the trailers of the Leopold and Loeb dramatizations mentioned earlier: