"We're told it was a cold-blooded killing because they planned and schemed. Yes, but here are officers of the state who for months have planned and schemed - and contrived - to take these boys' lives. Talk about scheming."
Defense Attorney Jonathan Wilk
Director: Richard Fleischer
Writer: Richard Murphy, from the novel by Meyer Levin
Cinematographer: William C. Mellor
Producer: Richard D. Zanuck
Starring: Orson Welles, Diane Varsi, Dean Stockwell, Bradford Dillman, E.G. Marshall, Martin Milner
Why I chose it
A movie friend suggested it, and knowing that we just lost Dean Stockwell and that I hadn't seen many (or any?) of his movies of this era, I picked this one immediately.
'No-spoiler' plot overview
In 1920s' Chicago, Judd Steiner (Stockwell) and Arthur Straus (Dillman) are two precocious and wealthy law students who seem intent on doing mischief just because they can get away with it. With Steiner under the thrall of the more controlling Straus, mischief turns into the murder of a young neighbor boy. They avoid suspicion even while acting oddly with their friends Sid (Martin Milner) and his girlfriend Ruth (Diane Farsi). Since there is no perfect crime, a personal item left at the scene starts to unravel their alibis. Finally, forced to confess to the District Attorney (E.G. Marshall), their fate lies in the hands of renowned attorney Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles), who is employed to defend them.
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| Shades of The Birds and Psycho here, but it's our young killers discussing their latest alibi stories (Dillman, left, and Stockwell, right) |
Now well into the TV and post-studio system era, the first generation of moguls was giving way to the next. Twentieth Century Fox founder Darryl Zanuck's son, Richard, was now in the business and his first major producing project was this film. The story of the true-crime Leopold & Loeb case was back in the public consciousness due to a number of factors: the release on parole of Leopold, who subsequently started a new life and had just published his autobiography, the success of the novel Compulsion by Meyer Levin, and the turning the novel into a play on Broadway.
Former child star Stockwell got the part of Steiner (Leopold stand-in) in the stage version, and he was a natural to play the part in the film. Roddy McDowell, Straus in the play, was not cast in the film, but Bradford Dillman got the part. This supposedly prompted Stockwell to initially give Dillman a hard time on set. Eventually, they mended fences and got along. Orson Welles, who played the Clarence Darrow stand-in provided his own challenges. His time constraints put pressure on the production schedule, with a few portions of his record monologue near the end of the film being dubbed after, and he bullied nearly everyone on the production.
Even with the names changed, and the homosexual angle played down, Leopold had sued for invasion of privacy, but the case was dismissed. The film got no Oscar nominations, but all three lead actors (Stockwell, Dillman, Welles) won 'best actor' at the Cannes film festival that year. The Leopold & Loeb story was an inspiration for the play and subsequent Hitchcock classic film Rope, and a more provocative version of the two perpetrators, Swoon, from 1992.
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| Orson Welles, with trademark fake nose, makes his appearance over halfway into the film. |
Some other notable film-related events in 1959 (from Filmsite.org):
- The chariot race sequence in director William Wyler's Best Picture-winning, wide-screen Technicolor epic blockbuster Ben-Hur (1959) set the standard for all subsequent action sequences. The Biblical epic was the first film to win 11 Oscars, breaking the record of 8 Oscar wins originally set first by Gone With the Wind (1939) and 9 Oscar wins set a year earlier by Gigi (1958).
- After over 25 years of creating low-budget shorts, the comic team of The Three Stooges, known for farces and physical slapstick, made their last (190th) film. It was Columbia's short Sappy Bull Fighters (1959) - a low-budget remake of their own earlier film, What's the Matador? (1942)
- Doris Day and Rock Hudson were paired for the first time in the romantic comedy Pillow Talk (1959). Due to the film's success, the acting duo also appeared together in two 'sequels': Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964).
- Aroma-Rama, an experimental, short-lived scenting system developed by inventor Charles Weiss, was introduced to add over 50 scents to Carlo Lizzani's Italian documentary film about China titled Behind the Great Wall (narrated by Chet Huntley) by filtering 'Oriental' aromas into the auditorium through the air-conditioning system. The following year, a competing process, Smell-O-Vision, was introduced.
My Random Observations
- This was my first film in the 1950s' CinemaScope widescreen, which produced an aspect ratio of 2.55 :1. I call it super skinny. I'm not a particular fan of this aspect ratio, but it certainly provided lots to look at. In many scenes, Fleischer used extreme close-ups, so not necessarily taking advantage of the widescreen, but in others, he positioned characters in all dimensions to allow us to view multiple simultaneous interactions.
Artie Straus (Dillman, center) is happy that his "Mummsie" is distracting
local reporters Tom Daly (Edward Binns, left) and Sid Brooks (Milner, right).Artie shoots a menacing look at Judd while driving together late at night. - Another atypical feature of this film: black and white cinematography. In a decade that I usually associate with brightly saturated color movies, most of those I've picked for this blog series were made in just-fine-by-me B&W. I can only take away that far more films were made in B&W in the 1950s than I had thought.
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| I enjoyed Martin Milner in this role - he seemed so...normal...compared with the leads. |
- Was the character of Ruth (as played by Diane Varsi) for real? While dating a perfectly nice guy (Sid/Martin Milner), she is attracted to Judd, gets completely abused and almost raped by him, yet feels sorry for him in an icky motherly-like way. Even after she's confronted with him being a cold-blooded murderer, she *still* doesn't believe he's a bad person, or so we are led to believe. Perhaps she is there to help justify Attorney Wilk's courtroom argument but her feelings seem to go way overboard here. Spoiler: she does end up back with Sid.
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| Ruth looks at Judd and extends a friendly hand. Her boyfriend Sid (left) is appropriately skeptical. |
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| About to be raped, Ruth applies the motherly treatment toward Judd, who finally breaks down, revealing he has emotions after all. |
- Much of the detective work in breaking open the case involves Judd's glasses that he dropped where the dead boy's body was dumped. Even though the police eventually found a distinguishing feature that tracked the glasses back to Judd, early on there was so much talk about the glasses being so common as to be no help at all. As a result, I seriously was wondering why Judd didn't run out and buy himself another pair (discreetly of course) so he didn't have to run around revealing to everyone that he was missing his glasses and bringing suspicion on himself.
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| I liked this quirky visual. |
- Much is made of Wilk's (Orson Welles) 10-minute monologue arguing to spare his clients from the death penalty near the end of the film. It was a fine performance, but the actual words didn't do much for me. Of course, as I'm someone who abhors the death penalty, maybe my already being convinced of the points he was making had me yawning. See what you think. The entire text of the actual speech Darrow delivered, excerpted faithfully in the film, can be found here.
- For this week's edition of Bit Player Bingo, I present Gavin MacLeod (Mary Tyler Moore Show, Love Boat) as an associate of the state attorney played by E.G. Marshall. MacLeod just passed away recently (May 2021).
Gavin McLeod (left with red squiggly arrow). Welles in center.
Further Reading
As usual, I find the TCM article on the film a great overview with background and context.
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