It's no doubt a good thing that Welles didn't appear in the film until the last 40 minutes or so. His performance was forced and cringe-worthy, and his scripted lines horrible. Is this travesty the fault of the script, Welles, or both?
I disagree i thought Welles gave a graet performance.
shareI agree. Welles was dreadful as the Clarence Darrow lawyer.
shareI just watched it for the first time in maybe 30 years. The film is so much more interesting in the 80 minutes or so before Welles shows up. I think the performance he gave is completely devoid of passion and if there's anything that I expect from Darrow (by his own name or otherwise), it is some degree of dedication to a cause. His speech is actually yawn inducing because he's just going through the motions, he seems to want to be somewhere else.
The rest of the film is quite well-handled, even if Dillman doesn't quite seem up to the task on the level of Stockwell. It's nice to see E.G. Marshall and Edward Binns together again after 12 Angry Men and the real surprise of the film is Martin Milner. Pauline Kael said that if the murderers had been aesthetes, Milner would have been the victim, but in a role that called for the All-American boy, he may appear to be doing very little, but that takes more work than is apparent. He may have been typecast as the type, see Marjorie Morningstar, Too Much Too Soon or Sweet Smell of Success and you'll see Milner playing the same character, but he was a lot better at it than the Tabs and the Troys of his era.
Kudos also for the film at least getting the hairstyles right for the most part. One of the few 50s and 60s films set 30-40 years earlier that bothers with that detail.
It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me
I've watched Compulsion again in the past year and thought better of it than when I wrote my too dismissive IMDB review, written some years back. It was a handsome production, for one thing; and if maybe too Hollywood looking it was Hollywood at its best. The black and white photography was stunning.
Welles wasn't the right guy for the defense attorney, being way too cosmopolitan a type to play a scrappy midwesterner like Darrow. They ought to have continued with the 12 Angry Men connection and gone for Ed Begley instead. Even Thomas Mitchell, maybe too old by then, would have been better.
Is it me or does the movie give off a U-I vibe more than a Fox one? Something about it is suggestive of the Douglas Sirk Tarnished Angels, Jack Arnold's The Tattered Dress. Their bigger budgeted black and white films often had a similar look. Fox's films had by that time acquired a slicker veneer, were far less pleasing to look at than they had been prior to the introduction of CinemaScope.
Martin Milner was fine. He had the sort of face and mannerisms that some people simply don't care for. I've grown accustomed to him of late and have learned to appreciate his work for what it is. It was rather his misfortune to suggest an All-American boy next door of the kind that a decade earlier Van Johnson had a lock on. Milner's a less mannered player than Johnson, had a more modest, natural screen presence.
It does look more like a Universal film than a Fox one, only if it was shot at the big "U" they would have had a scene in the famous town square set with the building in the background marked up as the courthouse.
That it may look different could have been a conscious effort on the part of young Zanuck, here making his first film and possibly wanting to make an impression. William Mellor was a good cinematographer, his work on A Place in the Sun is probably my favorite thing about the film and Westward the Women is a superbly shot B&W western.
It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me
That was Richard Zanuck who produced the film? It could be that the picture or some of it was shot outside the Fox lot, I suppose. The studio's production values sank soon after CinemaScope, dipped further with the switch away from Technicolor. Their black and white product prior to that was quite good.
Compulsion could have been a product of the Fox of seven or eight years earlier, the era of The Day the Earth Stood Still and People Will Talk, but its look doesn't feel right for the time frame of its release.
Odd how that happened sometimes, which wasn't that often. The Universal-International that began to emerge 1946-47 had a totally different look from that of the old studio, much more A looking. I don't know if it was the first "official" U-I release but The Killers looks way better than even the typical Uni A from the old regime.
RKO retained some of its quality during the Hughes era, began to slide after Hughes sold and then bought back the studio. Starting in 1954 their movies don't look or feel at all like they come from the same studio as before. A lot of the behind the scenes technical staff "old reliables" had apparently left by then. The Farrow remake of Five Came Back looks downright shabby to me, as compared to even the comparatively recent Beware, My Lovely from just three years prior.
Welles' scene in the courtroom was terrible. It's not entirely the fault of Welles though. The way the scene is directed and shot works much too hard to present Welles in a show-piece of "great acting".
The director Fleischer did exactly the same thing with Tony Curtis in the last scene of The Boston Strangler. The action stops dead in order for one actor to have his big scene, and everything gets extremely earnest, self-congratulatory and boring.
Thank heavens Fleischer didn't do the same thing with 10 Rillington Place, which is chillingly restrained and realistic. It makes its point about capital punishment by showing not telling, as every good movie should. A cliche, but true.
Welles directed the trial scenes (according to TCM)
No idea what the OP is on about - it´s one of the most powerful courtroom speeches I´ve seen in any film. Excellently written, outstandingly performed. In fact, he´s very good in pretty much ´all´ of his scenes in Compulsion, right from the instant he shows up. The more of Welles´s acting I see, the more he impresses.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
Robert Osborne. TCM. American Treasure.
Just gave a brief overview after the film. The courtroom scenes were all directed by Mr. Welles.
Now, I've always had this problem. How can you self-direct? First you're on one side of the camera. Then you have to stop, tell yourself and everyone else what to do, run to the other side of the camera. Act for a while. Stop. When someone does something wrong, you have to run to the other side of the camera, tell yourself again what to do, and everybody else what to do, then run to the other side of the camera...etc.
This MUST be a very tiring proposition, to be sure.
Welles is obviously a brilliant actor/director. Why else would there be so many people in complete disagreement about him? If he were mush, then everyone would say he was mushy. But he wasn't.
I still think he did the same thing on The Third Man. Carol Reed got the credit for directing that one. But then look at "The Man Between." The Third Man is completely a different movie (much better). The Third Man is similar to this movie. Welles is only shown toward the end of the film. But his presence is felt during the entire movie. In the scenes and the way they're shot, etc.
He's not mushy. Even if he was overly dramatic at times. But so are those Shakespeare guys all the time.
I often like to look away from the screen during a Welles performance. You can hear him just as he must have sounded on the old radio programs. You really don't need to watch him. Powerful presentation just listening to him. He scared a whole bunch of people way back when. Pretty good.
When you can make people believe in a Martian invasion, you're not too bad.
Welles' performance was indeed powerful and not at all over-the-top as the OP seems to suggest. Welles is excellent in all his scenes, but the final courtroom scene was especially moving. He did look older than his 44 years; his struggles with TPTB in Hollywood were etched on his face.
shareAll I know is Well's Performance was good enough for me. Although it would have Robbed Stacey of a great role, It would have been interesting to see Wells reprise Darrow in Inherit The Wind.
Oh GOOD!,my dog found the chainsaw
Darrow in "Inherit the Wind" would have been a good role for Welles. And, Darrow in "Compulsion" would, also, have been a good role for Tracy. It could have happened in the legit theatre but, I guess, sadly, didn't.
shareSame here. I don't think even Welles himself would tell you every performance he ever gave was uniformly great, but in this film, we'll start with the content of that closing argument as absolutely stunning. As for the delivery, I'm not sure what problem the OP and others have with it, other than calling it "bad" and "hammy" over and over. I wonder whether any of them have ever seen a high-profile lawyer doing a closing like this one. There is nearly always a theatrical element to it. It is not natural speech. It is "artificial" in the denotative sense of that word. It is constructed for a purpose. I thought Welles' demeanor and delivery were about right for the argument.
And not only for closing argument really, but for his whole offhanded portrayal of the attorney, which is much more realistic than the standard screen portrayal of the lawyer brought in to defend or prosecute the main characters in a film, in which that lawyer acts like his (or her, ff. too) life depends on the case, like this is the only client he's ever had, like he has a fervent personal belief rather than maybe a modicum of belief in some proportion with the sometimes mundane need to do a professional service he has done many times before. Welles' character acts like he's seen it all before, which he has. It isn't boredom, really, although it looks a little like it, which is why the beauty of the final argument takes you by surprise. It's more like a kind of mild professional jadedness and detachment, which is characteristic of experienced attorneys, who can't live and die with every case. (Even here, the character ends up not so much advocating for these two murderers personally, but rather his fervency and eloquence is put to use in advocating for a more evolved system of justice that doesn't kill people -- not trying to start that argument up here, I'm just saying that's what the character is after; he is not particularly attached to the specific defendants.) If the families fire him, there'll be another case next week, as there has always been for the past four decades. Not very many attorney characters get this right, but Welles does, and not only in demeanor but also in strategy and tactics.
I always wonder, when somebody criticizes the acting in an older film like this, whether they're applying modern criteria to the assessment. I think, or hope, it's generally understood that acting in general used to be more theatrical and frequently came off as melodrama, even in stories where it didn't seem particularly appropriate. I mean, if you want hammy and melodramatic, let's try Bradford Dillman, particularly early in this film. Man.
I actually was thinking, as the film went on with no sign of Welles other than his top billing in the opening credits, and then as he showed up about two-thirds of the way through, that this was going to be a case of huge ego and name value glommed onto a phoned-in performance. That was until I realized what he was doing with the character. And then came that really moving final argument. I'm fine with calling bad performances from highly-touted actors exactly what they are -- in fact, I'm kind of enthusiastic about it, because it strikes me as both a duty and a service -- but this isn't one of them.
As much as I love Orson Welles, especially his Shakespearean films, I have to agree. He was awful in this film. Very mechanical, tired and without passion. I think it's his worst performance. I know that's a heresy to those who worship the great Welles, but no one hits them out of the park every single time. In fact, his performance drags down what is an otherwise, compelling and extremely well done film.
share[deleted]
I respect Darrow. But I dont agree with his role in this case though as a lifelong defense lawyer against capital punishment, I give him points for consistency.
What I detested was the movie where they made the prosecutor look petty and gave Orson this wise tone during the court case. It was offensive to me the way the movie made it out so that we are supposed to be understanding of these two murderers that they should be spared.
What I detested was the movie where they made the prosecutor look petty and gave Orson this wise tone during the court case.
Agree with the OP. I guess the idea was that he was playing a legendary figure, and hopefully his restraint could be seen as Darrow's gravitas. But Welles is completely out of it. He acts (and looks) like he's got a really bad hangover.
shareWelles was PISSED:
From TCM…
"Because Orson Welles was having tax problems during the production, at the end of shooting his salary for the movie was garnisheed by the L.A. Sheriff's department. This upset Welles so much that just before he finished looping his dialogue in post-production, he stormed off the studio and left the country. All that was left to be looped was the last twenty seconds of his end speech in the courtroom. Incredibly, editor 'Bill Reynolds' fixed this problem without needing Welles. Reynolds took words and pieces of words Welles had spoken earlier in the movie, and pieced them one by one into those twenty seconds."