Compulsion (dramatized from Meyer Levin's novel) re-enacts, exhaustively and explicitly, one of the grisliest horror stories of the century—the Loeb-Leopold murder case. Told in 20 scenes and lasting some three and a half hours, Compulsion begins just after two young homosexuals have, with long-calculated wantonness, killed a 14-year-old boy. There follow revelations of self-styled supermen who had dreamed of committing a perfect crime; of gay, violent, vicious Artie Straus (Richard Loeb) and his "superior slave," Judd Steiner (Nathan Leopold); of how imperfect a crime the two had actually committed; of their dissension as danger looms, their behavior as detection narrows; of the fantasy worlds in which both had lived. There is finally the trial, with the prosecution flaunting the atrocious nature of the crime, and the defense the compulsive pathology of the criminals.
The jagged, episodic structure of Compulsion constantly stresses the factual, historical, documentary nature of the narrative. It no less constantly' proclaims the strength of the subject matter—its ability to vibrate and electrify as theater—and the weakness, its inability to widen and deepen as drama. The cause is less the usual documentary one, that truth tends to be formless, than that in Compulsion truth lacks a spacious enough frame of reference.
Friedrich Hebbel, 19th century German dramatist, perhaps put his finger on why Compulsion fails to be large and liberating drama when he said that in a good play everyone must seem in the right. For the two killers this is impossible, less because of how hideous their crime is than how gratuitous: it lacks an understandably human motive. Clinically, the crime can be explained: given a lawless Jazz Age, two badly spoiled, rich men's sons, a homosexual neurosis and a Nietzschean intellectual arrogance, and such a chemical mixture may explode into murder-for-a-thrill. But the case—and its causes —remain too special to expand into identifiable bedevilment in man's fate. It is Grand Guignol in real life.