telling a story you don’t want to tell
by Douglas Messerli
Tom Kalin and Hilton Als (screenplay), Tom
Kalin (director) Swoon / 1992
No
one with any shred of conscience might want to turn these two narcissistic
admirers of Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of supermen (Übermenschen) who
they perceived themselves to be—and to prove it kidnapped and bludgeoned the
boy to death in the back seat of a car with a chisel before depositing the body
in a lake and pouring hydrochloric acid upon it in the hopes its facial and
other features might be burned away—as heroes or even unknowing dupes of a
viscous society.
In
Rope Alfred Hitchcock isolated the two men and their heinous acts by
locking them away for the entire duration of his film in the claustrophobic
confines of their apartment, separating the men and their horrible contagion
from infecting the rest of us. The victim, in this version, is an adult who is
made to appear socially and romantically unfit to marry his fiancée, Janet
Walker (Joan Chandler). To express Leopold and Loeb’s perversity, Hitchcock
does not focus on their homosexuality—although he certainly doesn’t hide it,
continually referring to their shared bed—but whips up instead a black farce of
a funeral, to which family members, the fiancée, and their University of
Chicago professor are invited without them knowing they are not only sitting
near but actually dining upon their loved one’s buried (stuffed into a
large chest) corpse. By the time Hitchcock’s camera is finished dollying in and
out of these rooms during the real time event, the audience is so dizzied that
they stumble out of the theater as if they have just been set free from the
prison to which the two murderers would be confined for most of the rest of
their lives. Even the stuttering James Stewart, as the professor who, in philosophical
speculation, jested about guilt and innocence, doesn’t quite get off free from
having partaken in their insane “joke,” Hitchcock’s quiet suggestion that
perhaps society itself was unknowingly party to their horrible acts.
Richard Fleischer, basing his film on the Meyer Levin work Compulsion,
focuses his version of the crime on the psychological instability of the two
murderers, on their relationship to parents and siblings, and their distorted
views of the world outside of their intellectually aloof and financially
privileged visions of others. Except for an occasional conspiratorial whisper
among the two men and the intensity of their conversations with one another,
the ordinary normative-minded viewer might never even suspect that these two
ever spent any time in bed. Most of the film, in fact, turns the crime into a
whodunit, in which the police, Perry Mason-style, outwit the criminals. Only at
the end of the film, when Orson Welles as Clarence Darrow spouts a 15-minute
summary in which he argues that they are guilty by insanity and sociopathic
immaturity (another way of suggesting in the first half of this century that
the two might have been sexually involved) do we get any clue of their
convoluted love. Fleischer keeps the actual crime and their bedroom sex out of
eyesight as surely as the real judge in the 1924 banned women from attending
the court when Leopold’s psychologist testified about their sexual intimacies.
Fleischer faces the unpleasant task of telling us of Leopold and Loeb’s
unspeakable actions by heavily censoring them. If Darrow saves them from the
gallows it is basically because they were highly intelligent, sick boys who, as
You
have to credit Tom Kalin’s 1992 reading of the Leopold-Loeb affair for giving
it “the full monty” if nothing else. Beginning with Richard Loeb (Daniel
Schlachet) along with transvestite and transexual figures such as Noshom
Wooden, Trash, and Trasharama reading from Sacher-Masoch's paean to S&M, Venus
in Furs that reminds us of the 1980s ads for Calvin Klein’s perfume and
cologne “Obssession” (spoofed, appropriately, on Saturday Night Live as
“Compulsion”), Kalin and his collaborating writer Hilton Als lay the whole
affair right on the laps of contemporary culture.
Instead of hiding those acts, as Fleischer does, however, this director
presents them in all too gritty detail, showing how the two lured Bobby into
their rented car, and how Loeb took great pleasure in beating the 14-year-old
with the chisel he brought along just for that act. Blood squirts out of the
gagged boys head, dripping over the murderer’s hands as Leopold (Craig Chester)
drives ahead in semi-horror, yet all too ready to help drop the boy with his
lover into the pond and pour out the entire bottle of acid over him.
By
this time Kalin has made it quite clear that as weak and subservient to Loeb as
Leopold was, that he—so similar to the
relationship between Perry Smith and “Dick” Hickok in Richard Brooks’ In
Cold Blood which made it clear that Smith had committed the murders just
because of his hidden homosexual attraction to Hickok—would do almost anything
that Loeb demanded of him, even if without his lover’s insistence he would
never have.
Kalin and Als, in short, do not spare either man because of their love
for one another, their cultural isolation, or their own self-hatred for their
Jewish births. These were monsters, not unlike Bonnie and Clyde, and others of
the day who committed unforgivable acts sometimes just for the evil thrill of
it.
Yet
this film takes us, during its second half, to a different level by making us
aware that if Leopold and Loeb were monsters, so too might that word be applied
to much of the populace in which they lived continuing in various guises still
today. The followers of the mid-1920s trial were not only shocked by the fact
that these two men randomly murdered a young boy, but because of their social
status, ethnicity and, particularly, their sexuality.
As
I mentioned above, women were banned from the court hearings as if they were
too fragile to hear the psychologist’s bowdlerized recounting of the murderer’s
sexual acts. As Kalin surrealistically shows us by bringing the bed with the
two laying naked upon it directly into the courtroom, it was as if their being
queer was equal—and surely more interesting for the mobs of the day—to murder.
Indeed, murder was readily invoked by numerous members of the normative society
as the way to solve the problem of having such people in the world at large.
Not only should they be tarred and feathered, many argued, but shot or hung.
Like today, gun-toting vigilantes were at the ready to make sure justice was
served through their deaths. Accordingly, for the man-in-the-street, murder was
not even Leopold and Loeb’s major crime as much as was their sexuality, their
intellectual superiority, and their race.
After his arrest, Leopold, insisting that he knew what he doing and was
ready to face the consequences, even played to the camera as a snobbish,
slightly peeved homosexual in the manner of the later film villain Addison
DeWitt in All About Eve.
Apparently, Loeb died in prison by having his neck slit by another
prisoner with whom, ironically, he refused to have sexual intercourse. In
uncontrollable mourning Leopold was brutally bound in a straitjacket for
several months.
Even worse, if far more banal, when Leopold was finally freed from
prison after becoming a model prisoner, he moved to Puerto Rico, married a
woman, attempted to join a born-again Christian group, and despite his parole
restrictions, regularly drank and carried firearms, leading apparently the
totally normal life he had previously scorned. At least he left his eyes to the
University of Puerto Rico, but I wouldn’t want to be the blind person who
inherited those eyes that had witnessed what was still called “the crime of the
century,” which included not just the murder of a young innocent, but the
stupor-like swoon into which much of the society fell.
Los Angeles, October 12, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My
Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).
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