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Review: Drama
review of John Logan’s Never the Sinner
Never
the Sinner,
by John Logan, produced by the Actors Theater of Minnesota, performed at
the Loring Playhouse in Minneapolis March-April 2001, directed by
Gregg Peterson
This non-fiction
play is based on the abbreviated trial of the infamous Leopold-Lobb “thrill”
murder in Chicago in 1924.
The subject
matter will be revolting to some. Two homosexual “spoiled rich kids” get
carried away with Nietzchean philosophy (as they see it, quite
contrary to The Gay Science), their own narcissism and
“philosophical superiority” to murder a little boy “for nothing” (perhaps out
of compulsiveness or “harming obsession”) as the defense attorney (Jay
Nickerson) claims. It takes a while for it to sink in that the
fact of their crimes is irreversible. Of course, it’s easy
to say that the story panders to the worst stereotypes that can be imagined
about gays, when in fact the incident is very much an anomaly.
The technique of
script-writing uses encapsulation and flashbacks, tracing the discovery of
the young men’s relationship, and how they talk themselves into committing
the crime, which is shown essentially in pantomime. The sets are
very simple, with placeholders for the press, the prosecutor and defense, and
“the boys” in court, without the hanging judge. The gratuitous nature of the
crime and the incredulity of an insanity plea make a good case for the death
penalty (as it would have for Damher) but they do wind up with life + 99
years. At one point, the prosecutor justifies the death penalty in a circular
fashion, by referring to the doughboys that our country sacrificed in the
carnage of World War I.
The “boys,”
always fully dressed in tweed suits, come across as
all-American. The affection between them comes across as clearly
wholesome, not really sexual. Loeb (Nathan Suprenant)
comes across as more exuberant than the initially nerdy Nathan Leopold
(Stephen Frethem), who, lost in his intellectual world of ornithology,
could hardly have conceived of the crime; but as the play progresses, Leopold
comes across as forceful as Loeb, and turns out to be almost as
amoral. Frethem seems almost too robust to portray the
supposedly skinny, “sissy-boy” Loeb.
There was a book
about this case called Compulsion by Meyer Levin, with a
film by that title, directed by Richard Fleischer from 20th Century Fox in
1959.
(Previous
review),
Meyer
Levin. Compulsion (1958? 1996 republished Carroll
& Graf, 0786703199, 412 pgs) is a novel of two homosexual men who murder
a small boy, in a pattern that somewhat resembles the Loeb-Leopold case in
Chicago in 1924, although the details are very much changed. The book created
a sensation in the late 1950s when the subject matter was shocking, and it
became a film from 20th Century Fox (dir. Richard Fleisher) in 1959, which
would lead to litigation. Today the story would probably seem to be an
aberration that panders to stereotypes. The title of the book suggests that
the crime was committed for "kicks" and that notion was
particularly titillating at the time of publication
Another brutal
crime film released in 1967, In Cold Blood, based on a
two-man crime (against a whole family) in Kansas. I saw that
film my first weekend while on pass in Army basic training in early May,
1968, right after a run-in with the downtown Columbia, S.C. (Ft. Jackson)
“uniform police.” The film is in black and white CinemaScope, and was
directed by Richard Brooks (Columbia). It is based on a famous book by Truman
Capote, whose work itself generated two films around 2005 (below).
In 2002, Sandra
Bullock produced (and starred as a detective in) a film with a similar
story, Murder by Numbers (Warner
Brothers/Castle Rock) in which the two privileged young men are played by
Ryan Gosling (the extrovert) and Michael Pitt. Oitt’s character
makes the statement in a class debate: “Freedom is a crime because it first
thinks of itself instead of the group,” and then Pitt later tells Bullock
that he enjoys taking “indefensible positions: (left-wing or not). The victim
here is a young woman, and the boys are supposedly openly heterosexual, with
an erotic tension between them developing during the movie. There are a
couple of confrontations between the two boys where Gosling’s character seems
to be teasing Pitt’s into surrendering into an intimate relationship; one
wishes they had become lovers and stopped at that that.The film was
compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, and has a climax remind one
of Vertigo (the greatest film ever made!)
Swoon (1992,
Strand/Killer Films, dir. Tom Kalin, 82 min, R) is a film dramatization
of the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case. It is filmed in stark black-and-white to keep
a certain level of abstraction, but the “gay couple” seems more repulsive in
this film than in the stage rendition reviewed above. They went on a crime
spree before the murder, and gloated about not being caught. When they are
suspects and then during the trial, the society around them shows its usual
phobia of what is different. The men are called "inverts" and
"perverts." At one point there is an animated anatomical
explanation of their "pathology." At one point, the testimony
recalls to mind the crimes of Jeff Dahmer in 1991. The film
compares the crimes to other crimes of the day, associated with Prohibition.
The film dwaddles on rather simple things, like
typewriter keys. It seems amazing that they do not get the death penalty,
which at the time was hanging, as they are considered deficient or
"insane." Like Dahmer, Loeb would be "executed" by a
prisoner (his body did not get extreme unction because "he's
Jewish"), but Leopold would eventually get out. His book would be
called Life Plus Ninety Nine Years.
A famous Alfred
Hitchcock film with this theme is Rope (1948, Warner Bros.,
80 min) in which two men (James Stewart, John Dall) decide to murder
another young man and hide his body in an apartment just to see what it feels
like and express their superiority. A disturbing notion to be sure. The film
is shot in one continuous take, and is famous for that reason. Later critics
would consider the two young men to be homosexual, although that could not be
made explicit in 1948. If so, it is not a good reflection on the gay male
community, so I tend to discount this claim.
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