COMPULSION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1051, 16 October 1959, Page 20

COMPULSION

(20th Century-Fox) A Cert. APPROXIMATELY 24 hours after I saw Compulsion, Nathan Leopold -paroled 18 months ago on serving 33 years of a_ life-plus-99 years sentence

for kidnapping and murder — filed suit for 1,500,000 dollars against Meyer Levin, author. of the book and play from which this film was adapted, and 56 other assorted defendants among whom the makers of the film were reported to be joined. Since any resemblance which the film may have to a portrayal of actual people and events is now (you might say) technically sub judice, comment on its provenance would

lie outside the bounds of privilege. But one can-at this distance at least-dis-cuss without prejudice the quality of the production as a piece of screen drama. I should say right away that I did not find it quite so compulsive as I imagined it might be. nor as cathartic

as it should have been. This deficiency is not to be attributed to the casting, which by and large is as effective and apposite as the painstaking reproductions of the midTwenties achieved by the property and wardrobe sections. Nor can one quarrel with the acting, which is never less than competent and more often excellent. But certain weaknesses in the script of the opening half of the produc-tion-among them an

inadequate realisation of the relationship of the two principal characterscompounded by the uncertain direction of Richard Fleischer, have to a noticeable extent inhibited that evocation. of horror which should have been dominant in the early phase of the action. For this, in intent and to a degree in performance, is a film with a marked ebb and flow of emotion, and the impact of the drama (and its purgative quality) depend on a nice balance between strophe and antistrophe. Compulsion is the story of Judd Steiner and Artie Strauss (Dean Stockwell, Bradford Dillman), two college boys of high intelligence, psychopathic, ostensibly (but not persuasively) homosexual; one a sad mixture of intellectual arrogance and emotional masochism, the other domineering and vicious. ‘These self-styled supermen, having resolved to savour all available experience, murder a child for the thrill of it. The halfbaked Nietzschian philosophising before the deed (which occurs offstage), and the querulous squabbling afterwards, as police find one elementary clue after another, unfortunately do not at any point transfix us with the enormity of the offence-in spite of Stockwell’s impressive attempt at the complex character of Steiner and Dililman’s rather flashy and mannered playing of Strauss. Interest rather fastens on the representatives of the law- it is at least the State Attorney (excellently played by E. G. Marshall, one of the Twelve Angry Men) who tends to dominate the scene increasingly until the second phase develops. And it is in one’s attitude to the Attorney rather than to the accused that the emotional change of the second phase of the story is most evident. This second phase is completely dominated by Orson Welles, as a great liberal lawyer who conducts the defence of the two accused. Welles has some of the finest writing in the script and being (one suspects) above and beyond direction draws all the drama on himself. His address to the judge (the plea is guilty) is a long and passionate denunciation of capital punishment which by itself is enough to justify the production as a serious contribution to thé social cinema. The part is not as difficult as some Welles has set himself, and it could be |

argued that the speech is too long, but there is no denying the power of the peroration.