Compulsion; Rope

The 1924 kidnapping and killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by a pair of young Chicago intellectuals—Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb—has inspired numerous books and films, including Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 Rope (based on Patrick Hamilton's play) and Richard Fleischer's 1959 Compulsion (based on the bestselling novel by Meyer Levin), as well as 1992's Swoon and 2002's Murder by Numbers. Hitchcock's Rope—his first color film—is a nearly edit-free film comprised of less than a dozen scenes (the camera routinely zooms into a character's back roughly every 10 minutes—the length of a reel at the time—to try to hide the cut) entirely set in an apartment (except for an opening establishing shot of the street outside—in which Hitchcock makes his traditional cameo). Aesthetes Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger) first commit a murder and then host a dinner party for—among others—the lads' Nietzsche-championing professor (James Stewart), who eventually begins to suspect that his former charges may be guilty of foul play. As screenwriter Arthur Laurents points out in the fine half-hour retrospective “making-of” featurette, Stewart was rather miscast—all three male characters in Hamilton's play homosexual, like Leopold and Loeb themselves, but the subject (“it” in Hollywood parlance) was strictly taboo in the heyday of the Hays production code. What still works well here is Hitchcock's brilliant but spare use of suspense (in one wonderful sequence, the camera follows the maid as she slowly clears off the trunk in which the body is hid—in preparation for putting away some books—while the conversations in the room continue on the soundtrack) and sterling dialogue (guest Mrs. Atwater: “When I was a girl, I used to read quite a bit.” Brandon: “Oh, we all do strange things in our childhood”). In fact, the only really clunky scene in the entire film is Stewart's false-ringing morality speech at the close—aside from that, Rope remains a nasty little chiller. Recommended. Compulsion, filmed over a decade later (ironically, in black-and-white) hews much more closely to the actual facts of the Leopold-Loeb case and features Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell as the intellectual murderers who “agreed to explore all the possibilities of human experience.” Far more conventional in its approach, the film follows the twin storylines of the pair's steadily ratcheting uneasiness (with Stockwell in the nervous nellie role here) after the killing and the ongoing investigation that uncovers damning evidence involving a typewriter and a pair of glasses. After the young men confess, the scene shifts to the courtroom, where Orson Welles (playing a character based on Clarence Darrow) delivers one of the longest monologues in the annals of Hollywood film, mounting an impassioned defense against capital punishment (“I'm pleading not for these two lives, but for life itself”). Presented in a pristine transfer on an extra-less disc (aside from trailers), Compulsion is also recommended, and together with Rope makes for an interesting double-bill for both individuals and film clubs. (R. Pitman)[Blu-ray/DVD Review—Mar. 7, 2017—Kino, 103 min., not rated, DVD: $29.95, Blu-ray: $29.95—Making its latest appearance on DVD and debut on Blu-ray, 1959's Compulsion features a nice transfer with stereo 2.0 sound. Extras include audio commentary by film historian Tim Lucas, and trailers. Bottom line: this solid true-crime drama makes a welcome debut on Blu-ray.]