Compulsion (1959 film)


Compulsion is a 1959 American crime drama film directed by Richard Fleischer. The film is based on the 1956 novel of the same name by Meyer Levin, which in turn was a fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb murder trial. It was the first film produced by Richard D. Zanuck.
Although the principal roles are played by Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman, top billing went to Orson Welles.

Plot

Close friends Judd Steiner and Artie Strauss kill a boy on his way home from school in order to commit the "perfect crime". Strauss tries to cover it up, but they are caught when police find a key piece of evidence — Steiner's glasses, which he inadvertently left at the scene of the crime. Famed attorney Jonathan Wilk takes their case, saving them from hanging by making an impassioned closing argument against capital punishment.

Cast

Production

Welles, whose recent thriller Touch of Evil was overlooked in America, was bitter at not being selected to direct Compulsion. His time on the set was tense, and he threw frequent tantrums.
In the early 1950s, Meyer Levin visited Nathan Leopold in prison and requested that Leopold cooperate with him on writing a novel based on the murder. Leopold declined saying he didn't wish his story told in fictionalized form but asked Levin if he could help him write his memoir. Levin was unhappy with that suggestion and wrote the novel anyway, releasing it in 1956. The novel was called Compulsion, the book the film is based on. Leopold would read the book and reportedly didn't like it. Leopold later wrote that reading the book made him "physically sick... More than once I had to lay the book down and wait for the nausea to subside. I felt as I suppose a man would feel if he were exposed stark-naked under a strong spotlight before a large audience."
In 1959, Leopold sought unsuccessfully to block production of the film on the grounds that Levin's book had invaded his privacy, defamed him, profited from his life story, and "intermingled fact and fiction to such an extent that they were indistinguishable."
Eventually the Illinois Supreme Court ruled against him, noting that Leopold, as the self-confessed perpetrator of the "crime of the century" could not reasonably demonstrate that Levin's book had damaged his reputation.

Reception

At the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, Dillman, Stockwell, and Welles won the Best Actor Award.
The film was nominated for the BAFTA best picture of the year, Richard Fleischer was nominated for best director by Directors Guild of America, and Richard Murphy was nominated for best screenplay by the Writers Guild of America.