I first saw Compulsion back in 1992 at a time when the BBC would, on occasion,
show a Cinemascope film in its correct ratio. Something they only started doing again very recently.
It was a masterpiece of cinema back then, and it remains so to this day. The difference between then and now is that
then I was watching it on video on a 14" portable TV, and now on DVD, upscaled on a Blu-ray player, to a 37" Plasma
TV.
As the film begins, in Chicago, 1924, we see wealthy law students Artie Straus (Bradford Dillman) and Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell)
steal money and a typewriter from a house, then take the evening one step further by driving at, and almost killing,
a drunk in the road. Judd's scared at Artie's insistence to do what they've done, but he's easily led by his cocky
friend and will stop at just about nothing to impress him. But how far will he go? As they discuss taking things
further, it's clear that Judd gets to love taking things dangerously too.
Fellow law student and friend, Sid (Martin Milner), who is also a newspaper reporter, gets to investigate the
murder of a young teenager, Paulie Kessler. Not only does the coroner tell him that the lad was hit over the head,
rather than drowned as he was led to believe so the corpse could be dumped on his department, but Sid also spots a pair
of glasses with the body. Glasses that don't fit. Who could they belong to?
Well, given that the whole thing ends up in a court case and is based on the real-life event where Nathan Leopold, Jr.
and Richard Loeb were Chicago students who killed a 14-year-old boy, it's hardly a spoiler to say that they must belong
to at least one of them.
Both Dillman and Stockwell pull off maniacal brilliantly, the former as the cool and calculated one, and the later
playing it nervous and edgy, coming into his own when he tries to take charge of any given situation but will inevitably
end up completely out of his depth.
The film also won a collective award for Best Actor from Cannes for Dean Stockwell, Bradford Dillman and Orson Welles
who, as famous defence lawyer Jonathan Wilk, is good, but I think he's overrated in this film and isn't a patch on the
other two. However, as he mumbles through his section of the film, appearing for the first time from just over an hour
into proceedings, Welles' character does do a nice line in sarcasm. His character was also based on the real-life famous
lawyer, Clarence Darrow, who took on the original case.
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One thing that's particularly clever about Compulsion is that it does away with convention - you don't actually
see the murder for which they're accused. That allows your imagination to bring more to the table than the film itself
can, and also allows the film to get away with a 12-certificate, since you're left with a marvellous string of scenes
from the two youngsters and Welles getting a number of chances to subtly steal a few scenes.
