Compulsion

Based on the notorious 1924 murder trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Compulsion (1959) offers a tense drama starring Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman as rich, arrogant, amoral law students who kill a young boy just for the thrill. Orson Welles gives a riveting performance as the Clarence Darrow-like defense attorney making an impassioned plea against the death penalty. Hitchcock tackled the same material in Rope four years after directing Lifeboat (1944), an absorbing story of the survival of passengers on an ocean liner torpedoed by a German U-boat. Tallulah Bankhead earns her top billing as a spoiled journalist. Crammed into their small vessel, they represent a microcosm of society driven by fear, prejudice, hate, and love—the full range of humanity. Intended as an allegory for McCarthyism, The Crucible (1996) centers on a 17th-century Salem witch hunt. An assembly of young women (led by a fiery Winona Ryder) caught practicing black magic divert attention from themselves by leveling charges of satanic influence against innocent villagers. A resulting investigation feeds on its own self-justification.