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This classy Fox production was considered the epitome of sick film subject matter in the pre- Psycho year of 1959, the true story of jazz-age thrill killers Leopold & Loeb. Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman are the nihilistic child murderers; Orson Welles stops the show with his portrayal of Clarence Darrow, going under a different name.

Compulsion

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1959 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date March 7, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Orson Welles, Dean Stockwell, Diane Varsi, Bradford Dillman, E.G. Marshall, Richard Anderson, Robert F. Simon, Edward Binns, Gavid McLeod, Russ Bender, Peter Brocco.

Cinematography: William C. Mellor

Film Editor: William Reynolds

Original Music: Lionel Newman

Written by Richard Murphy from a novel by Meyer Levin

Produced by Richard D. Zanuck

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Movies about serial killers and psychos with exotic agendas were much different before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which hit America in 1960 like a thrown brick.

Joan Collins in 'The Bitch': Sex tale based on younger sister Jackie Collins' novel. Author Jackie Collins dead at 77: Surprisingly few film and TV adaptations of her bestselling novels Jackie Collins, best known for a series of bestsellers about the dysfunctional sex lives of the rich and famous and for being the younger sister of film and TV star Joan Collins, died of breast cancer on Sept. 19, '15, in Los Angeles. The London-born (Oct. 4, 1937) Collins was 77. Collins' tawdry, female-centered novels – much like those of Danielle Steel and Judith Krantz – were/are immensely popular. According to her website, they have sold more than 500 million copies in 40 countries. And if the increasingly tabloidy BBC is to be believed (nowadays, Wikipedia has become a key source, apparently), every single one of them – 32 in all – appeared on the New York Times' bestseller list. (Collins' own site claims that a mere 30 were included.) Sex...

Billy Wilder directed Sunset Blvd. with Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett movies Below is a list of movies on which Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder worked together as screenwriters, including efforts for which they did not receive screen credit. The Wilder-Brackett screenwriting partnership lasted from 1938 to 1949. During that time, they shared two Academy Awards for their work on The Lost Weekend (1945) and, with D.M. Marshman Jr., Sunset Blvd. (1950). More detailed information further below. Post-split years Billy Wilder would later join forces with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond in movies such as the classic comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), the Best Picture Oscar winner The Apartment (1960), and One Two Three (1961), notable as James Cagney's last film (until a brief comeback in Milos Forman's Ragtime two decades later). Although some of these movies were quite well received, Wilder's later efforts – which also included The Seven Year Itch...

London, April 17: Actress-author Joan Collins says she has never used drugs despite Hollywood stars handing them out at parties.

The 79-year-old claims while partying with the Rat Pack (group of actors) in the 1950s she snubbed cocaine from crooner Sammy Davis Junior.

"Davis Junior tried to give me cocaine on a spoon," thesun.co.uk quoted Collins as saying.

"I said 'No, Davis' and blew the whole spoon all over his blue velvet dinner jacket," added the actress of films like "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" and "The Bitch".

The actress stuck to booze and cigarettes instead. "I just think that if you do.

We look back at Farley Granger's movie career, from the two masterpieces he made with Alfred Hitchcock to Luchino Visconti's operatic melodrama Senso

Spotted doing a cockney accent in a play while still at high school, Farley Granger was signed to a seven-year deal by MGM in 1943 and soon put to work alongside Anne Baxter and Dana Andrews in The North Star, a pro-Soviet war film about the sufferings of a Ukrainian village under the Nazi yoke.

With a script by blacklistee Lillian Hellman, The North Star – later reissued under the title Armored Attack! – was cited by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a prime example of Hollywood communist propaganda.

After one more film – The Purple Heart (1944) – and a spell in the navy where he discovered his bisexuality, Granger found himself cast in what would become his breakthrough film, They Live by Night. Shot in 1947, Nicholas Ray...

Hollywood veteran Farley Granger has died at the age of 85. The actor, best known for his collaborations with legendary moviemaker Alfred Hitchcock, passed away on Monday, March 28 in New York. His death has been attributed to natural causes, according to E! Online.

Granger started his career in a theater in his native California, where he was discovered by Hollywood heavyweight Samuel Goldwyn and handed a studio contract, which led to roles in "The North Star" (1943) and "The Purple Heart" (1944). He stepped away from Hollywood when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy but later returned to the movie business after serving in Hawaii and he went on to win a role in Hitchcock's classic 1948 thriller "Rope", with James Stewart.

Granger later re-teamed with the director for arguably his most famous film role in 1951's "Strangers on a Train". He went on to make films including "Senso", "The Naked Street" and...

Actor who rose to fame in Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers On a Train, but refused to conform to Hollywood pressures

Early on in his career, the actor Farley Granger, who has died aged 85, worked with several of the world's greatest directors, including Alfred Hitchcock on Rope (1948) and Strangers On a Train (1951), Nicholas Ray on They Live By Night (1949) and Luchino Visconti on Senso (1953). Yet Granger failed to sustain the momentum of those years, meandering into television, some stage work and often indifferent European and American movies.

The reasons were complicated, owing much to his sexuality and an unwillingness to conform to Hollywood pressures, notably from his contract studio, MGM, and Samuel Goldwyn. Granger refused to play the publicity or marrying game common among gay and bisexual stars and turned down roles he considered unsuitable, earning a reputation – in his own words – for being "a naughty boy".

He was also the victim of bad luck,...

Hollywood veteran Farley Granger has died at the age of 85.

The actor, best known for his collaborations with legendary moviemaker Alfred Hitchcock, passed away on Monday in New York. His death has been attributed to natural causes, according to E! Online.

Granger started his career in a theatre in his native California, where he was discovered by Hollywood heavyweight Samuel Goldwyn and handed a studio contract, which led to roles in The North Star (1943) and The Purple Heart (1944).

He stepped away from Hollywood when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy but later returned to the movie business after serving in Hawaii and he went on to win a role in Hitchcock's classic 1948 thriller Rope, with James Stewart.

Granger later re-teamed with the director for arguably his most famous film role in 1951's Strangers on a Train. He went on to make films including Senso, The Naked Street and The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, and appeared on TV shows and in theatre.

He opened up about his Hollywood career and his personal life in his 2008 memoir Include Me Out: My Life From Goldwyn to Broadway, revealing his relationships with men and women, including Ava Gardner, Shelly Winters, composer Leonard Bernstein and famed playwright Arthur Laurents, who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Rope.

Granger's longterm partner, soap opera producer Robert Calhoun, died in 2008.

(1959, 12, Second Sight)

As a student in the 1930s, Richard Fleischer switched from medicine to drama and later, between skilful genre movies and historical blockbusters, he directed four remarkable studies of famous, real-life murderers, all male, all insane : The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), Compulsion, The Boston Strangler (1968) and 10 Rillington Place (1971). Unlike the others, Compulsion is in black and white and adapted from a novel by Meyer Levin, but despite changing the characters' names and inventing some subsidiary figures, it sticks closely to the notorious 1924 case of Nathan Leopold (Dean Stockwell) and Richard Loeb (Bradford Dillman). Brilliant University of Chicago graduate students from wealthy Jewish families, they murdered a 14-year-old schoolboy as a way of establishing their indifference as Nietzschean supermen to conventional morality. Orson Welles dominates the film as Clarence Darrow, the great liberal attorney who defended them, his flowery 12-hour speech reduced to 10 minutes. The same case...