“God,” I said, “like Alfred Hitchcock, vouchsafes us only glimpses of Himself. I have often thought of this. And also that we make a game of trying to spot Him in this scene and then that, till we’ve squandered the revelation of the whole instead of simply accepting and enjoying what He has created.”

From the short story “Overture” by Peter De Vries, available in Without a Stitch in Time.

The murder of Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb has been the subject of more novels, plays, and movies than any other murder of the twentieth century, and there is a good reason for this. There is also a bad reason. The good reason is that most noteworthy murderers work alone, but it’s hard for an author to move the plot along if his main character doesn’t have anyone to talk to. No creative workaround, whether monologue, voiceover, or the talking dog in Son of Sam, will ever be as satisfactory as a story with two killers in it to begin with.

The bad reason is that Leopold and Loeb’s high-IQ Nietzschean madness is exactly the sort that would appeal to the kind of man who writes plays and novels. It isn’t just that L & L allowed an entirely justified feeling of superiority to become dangerously exaggerated—brainy writers know what that feels like, but so do most people (a fact that intellectuals usually fail to grasp). No, the most appealing aspect of their madness, to an intellectual type, is its genesis in books. “Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche,” said Clarence Darrow in his closing statement on the boys’ behalf, “but he may be the only one who was influenced in the way that he was influenced. . . . Here is a young boy, in the adolescent age, harassed by everything that harasses children, who takes this philosophy and believes it literally. It is a part of his life. It is his life.”

Very few people restructure their lives and personalities based on something they have read, and with the exception of religious fanatics, intellectuals are the only people who ever do it. In their darkest mental recesses, I would bet that most of the artists who have written about L & L think to themselves: These boys took ideas that seriously? Well, I wish more people would.

As far as I know, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) is the only version of the L & L story to put Nietzsche at the center of the story. It is in every other respect vastly inferior to Compulsion (1959). 

1. Taxidermy.

Like Norman Bates in Psycho, Dean Stockwell’s character in Compulsion collects stuffed birds. This was not a Hollywood embellishment—the real Nathan Leopold was an accomplished ornithologist, the nation’s leading expert on the rare Kirtland’s Warbler, and kept over 2,500 bird specimens in his study. (After being paroled in 1958 and moving to Puerto Rico, he authored A Checklist of Birds in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.) A novelist couldn’t have invented a better hobby for a refined young murderer. Little songbirds are beautiful and curious, but their black eyes, if you’ve ever looked into them, are emotionally dead. They have a sense of aesthetics but no ethics. Birds are exquisite sociopaths, is what I’m trying to say. 

2. Chicago.

The Windy City, capital of gangsters, corruption, and slaughterhouses—why wouldn’t you set your murder story in Chicago? Thanks to Carl Sandburg, its most famous nickname has the word “butcher” in it. I don’t know why Hitchcock put himself on the wrong side of historical accuracy once again and moved the setting to New York City. If I had to guess, I would blame the author of the play on which Rope was based, Patrick Hamilton. As an Englishman, he might not have been quite up on the cultural resonances of various American metropolitan areas. He was also a drunkard who was said to “consume whiskey as a car consumes petrol,” but that’s hardly an excuse. There is no such thing as too drunk to appreciate Chicago.

At the end of Rope, Jimmy Stewart summons the police by shooting a gun out the window. That never would have worked in Old Chicago.

3. Less campy, more straight-up twisted.

Yes, Leopold and Loeb were gay, but that’s no excuse for Farley Granger’s overacting. The boys’ sexuality was certainly an important part of their dynamic, but any writer who ignores the sadomasochistic side of their relationship is telling less than half the story. Nathan Leopold never would have said to his master, as Farley Granger says to John Dall, “Don’t you ever again tell me what to do and what not to do.” Nor would Dickie Loeb have had this conversation with his slave:

“You’re not frightened anymore, are you?”“No.”“Not even of me?”“No.”“That’s good.”

No, that’s not good, not to you! These lines from Compulsion are much more faithful, both to the historical Leopold and Loeb and to human psychology:

“When we made the deal, you said you could take orders. You said you wanted me to command you.”“I do, as long as you keep your part of the agreement.”

“Please, Artie, I’ll do anything you say.”“Anything?”

“You want me to order you to, Judd?”

4. Clarence Darrow.

Clarence Darrow was an odd person. For one thing, he was a hard-core determinist, which is why he was such a good defense lawyer—he literally did not believe in the concept of guilt. He didn’t necessarily think that, in different circumstances, his clients would have been angels, but at least they would not have been criminals.

Apart from the master-stroke of casting Orson Welles, I don’t think Compulsion necessarily handles the Darrow character very well. The script preserves his impassioned courtroom peroration against the death penalty (YouTube), but fails to mention that he still thought Dickie Loeb ought to have been put to death: “For the good of society and for the good of the boys . . . Loeb would be quietly, painlessly put to sleep—not as a punishment, for he is already doomed and life holds nothing for him. Death would be a merciful release.” (Determinism has a dark side.) But Rope does not have Darrow at all, and the philosophy professor is a poor substitute. Jimmy Stewart has only one moment half as compelling as anything Orson Welles does, and that is his interview with Farley Granger when he keeps stopping and releasing a metronome.

5. Dean Stockwell.

Did you really think Blue Velvet was as creepy as he could get?

Viscount Milner writing to a friend in 1903 about his reason for leaving politics, one of few such explanations not to sound either self-righteous or self-pitying:

I am too far, too increasingly out of sympathy with our political system, and with the political attitude of the bulk of my countrymen, to be a successful politician in the ordinary sense. I am an anachronism. It may be I was born too late, it may be I was born too soon. In the latter, I think the less probable case, I may be of some use in politics—as an outsider, though, never again as an active participant in the fray. But I am not going to make myself miserable any more, or to embarrass any Ministry or party, by holding office on the terms, on which under the conditions of our day it can alone be held. Every man can afford to hold some unpopular ideas. But I have amassed all the most unpopular. I hold, with real conviction, a whole posse of them, and I mean to allow myself the luxury of holding, perhaps even of occasionally expressing them.

Quoted in Edward Crankshaw’s The Forsaken Idea: A Study of Viscount Milner (1952)

Film noir is the easiest to identify and (as these things go) easiest to define of all the genres in cinema, yet it developed quite unintentionally—it wasn’t until well into its maturity that anyone realized it was a genre at all. The term film noir originated in postwar France when their theatres were glutted with all the American films they had missed during the German occupation. Seeing them all in one go, the French found in films like Laura, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and Scarlet Street commonalities that had escaped the notice of the filmmakers themselves. Robert Pippin detects a metaphor in this: It is true, both in noir and of noir, that no one understands what is happening to them until after it has finished happening—or as Orson Welles says in The Lady from Shanghai, “I never make up my mind about anything at all until it’s over and done with.” Until it’s too late to do anything about it.

From the introduction to Fatalism in American Film Noir (2012):

The brilliant achievement of the core group of great noirs is to show how terribly limited explanations that focus on the moral psychology of individuals turn out to be, given how little of the future they can actually effect as individuals. The explanation of what happens does not finally lie with what they do and why they try to do it, given how unstable, provisional, and often self-deceived are their claims to self knowledge, and given how little in control they are of their criteria for deliberation. . . .  

At some level, on some description of not knowing what one wants, or having a poor idea of what exactly it is that one wants . . . my wanting X can come to seem in some sense strange to me, “not really my want,” and the whole notion of agency can come to look thinned out and formal.

There aren’t many books about fatalism, probably because the people who would write them get to chapter three and start asking what’s the point. There isn’t much art about fatalism, either—plenty about fate, but that isn’t the same thing. In a Greek tragedy like Oedipus, the revelation that no amount of careful planning can stop the inexorable pull of fate is saved for the end as the big climax. Characters don’t act as if they knew from the start that destiny trumps decision. Noir, on the other hand, depicts what it’s like to operate in a world over which you know you have little control. Fatalism isn’t a revelation, it’s a lifestyle.

The last place one would expect to find fatalism in fiction is the mystery genre, where noir has some obvious ancestry. Detective work depends on motive being a reliable clue to human behavior, and on a personal conviction that there is a satisfying and coherent story out there to be discovered. In Britain, the underlying message of their entire detective-story tradition is that the truth can always be uncovered if you are observant and clever enough, which gives even weak and humble figures—a little old lady, an ineffectual English professor, or a fastidious Belgian—some power over the world. American hard-boiled detective stories are just the opposite: The toughest guy in the city is still powerless in the end, because even if he reconstructs a perfect blow-by-blow of what happened, he can never force the facts to yield up consolation or even make any satisfying kind of sense.*

It’s rare for an academic book to have too little gender theory rather than far too much, but there’s is something important that Pippin oddly fails to notice. The first chapter of his book, after the introduction, is on Out of the Past; the second chapter, The Lady from Shanghai. In both of those films, the main romance is between a woman who believes in fatalism and a man who does not and who, frankly, would prefer it if the woman he loved had a little more faith in human agency. In Lady from Shanghai, Rita Hayworth lives by an old Chinese proverb from her childhood, “One who follows his nature keeps his original nature in the end.” Orson Welles asks, “Haven’t you heard ever of something better to follow?” In Out of the Past, Jane Greer tells Robert Mitchum, “You’re no good for anyone but me. You’re no good and neither am I. That’s why we deserve each other.” Not only does Mitchum not believe her, he has already proven her wrong. Back in Bridgeport, at the beginning of the film before trouble found him again, he had successfully turned himself into a good man with an honest business and a good woman who loves him—a woman Jane Greer can prevent him from being with, but can’t force him to betray.

It makes sense to me, if not to Pippin, that the women would have a more extravagant view of human helplessness than the men. It has something to do with how much more discouraging it is to be Rita Hayworth than simply to be in love with Rita Hayworth.

I wish that Pippin had discussed the difference between fatalism and other forms of philosophical pessimism, especially the difference between existentialism (the world doesn’t matter and my actions don’t affect it) and fatalism (the world does matter, but I can’t affect it much). Existentialism is not compatible with Christianity, but fatalism is—at least I assume it is, since the Irish are Catholic and no one is more fatalistic than those guys. I don’t suppose there’s a film that puts a Christian spin on the usual noir themes, is there? Eve, Robby, film-buff readers I am unacquainted with, help me out. But only if you feel like it, since it doesn’t really matter in the long run. If I am fated to find such a movie, it’ll all come together eventually.

* This theory of the difference between British and American detective novels comes from Colin Watson’s Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience. I don’t know if Pippin has read that book, but he is welcome to borrow my copy if he hasn’t.