Compulsion (1959)

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• Bazat pe: Compulsion
• Filmat în: Los Angeles și Chicago

Compulsion is a 1959 American crime drama film directed by Richard Fleischer, based on the 1956 novel by Meyer Levin, which in turn is a thinly-fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb murder trial. The film stars Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman as the perpetrators, and Orson Welles as their defense attorney Jonathan Wilk. Diane Varsi, E. G. Marshall, and Martin Milner play supporting roles.

Production

Orson Welles, whose recent thriller Touch of Evil was overlooked in America (though appreciated in Europe), was bitter at not being selected to direct Compulsion. His time on the set was tense, and he threw frequent tantrums. Bradford Dillman, who played the character based on Dickie Loeb, recalled his experience with Orson Welles: "Although Orson was helpful to me on Compulsion, he was not overly friendly. Welles was not a gregarious person.

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 (the other murderer, Richard Loeb, was dead by that time). Leopold declined, saying he did not wish his story to be 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.

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 confessed perpetrator of the "crime of the century", could not reasonably demonstrate that Levin's book…

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