The New Pictures

Alias Jesse James (Hope Enterprises; United Artists), for moviegoers who have almost given up Hope, is a pleasant surprise: a Bob Hope farce that is actually funny, and sometimes downright hilarious. Comic Hope is cast as "the world's worst insurance agent," a 19th century nincompoop who caps his career by writing a $100,000 insurance policy for a man who avers that he is "well known in railroad and banking circles." Only later does Hope realize that he has insured the life of the nation's No. 1 public enemy: Jesse James (Wendell Corey).

"What do you hope to achieve with such colossal stupidity?" his boss roars, and Hope meekly replies: "I wanted to become your assistant." Instead, he is ordered to head west, find Jesse James and keep him alive at all costs. "B-b-but." Hope stammers, "I'm liable to get killed." To which the boss bellows a retort that is just as funny now as it was when Aristophanes was scratching the wax: "Stop trying to cheer me up!"

Out at the James ranch, Hope is met by Ma James (Mary Young), a dear little old lady with a rifle in her lap. As she oils it she quavers, "Ah'm jes' cleanin' up after the boys." Next morning Jesse announces wearily that he has to get up early and go to work--there's a man he has to kill. Ma pipes up. "Promise me you'll wear rubbers, son." But Hope rides out to the duel instead, rigs his guns to fire when he tips his hat, drops his man, saves the policy, captures the villain, gets the girl (Rhonda Fleming). Conclusion: as the grateful townsfolk gather around and promise to erect a statue of the hero in the public square, Hope strikes a statuesque attitude, suddenly finds himself occupied by a passing flock of pigeons. Best spot gag: Hope saunters over to a small boy who is playing the piano at a Missouri wingding, pats his head, gently inquires, "What's your name, son?" The boy looks up, peering uncertainly through thick glasses. "Harry Truman," he says.

Compulsion (Zanuck Productions; 20th Century-Fox) is a terse, tense, intelligent melodramatization of "the crime of the century": the Leopold-Loeb murder case of 1924. Richard Murphy's screenplay borrows many of its keenest scenes from Meyer Levin's Broadway version of his own bestselling casebook of the crime (TIME, Nov. 12, 1956), preserves in the film (103 minutes) all the essential details of the play (180 minutes), eliminates only a few of the far-out psychiatric references. One important addition: a taut sense of dramatic sequence.

Judd Steiner and Artie Straus (fictional names for Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb) are wealthy, brilliant young law students at the University of Chicago. Straus-Loeb, as portrayed by Bradford Dillman, is the spoiled-rotten son of a socialite mother. At 18, he is already a vicious little sadist. Steiner-Leopold, as Dean Stockwell interprets him, is a motherless young genius whose IQ is too high to be measured by any known intelligence test--essentially a gentle boy who has been completely mesmerized by the animal magnetism of his evil companion. Straus-Loeb is the superman, Steiner-Leopold the "superior slave" in a private world of post-Nietzschean fantasy and homosexual practice.

Carried away by a kind of folie `a deux, the boys resolve "to explore all the possibilities of human experience," to pluck the most exotic flowers of evil. Murder, Artie decides, is the only thing that will satisfy his compulsion "to do something really dangerous," and Judd loyally approves "the perfect crime" as "the true test of the superior intellect." So they kidnap a 14-year-old schoolboy named Paulie Kessler (fictional name for Bobby Franks), cosh-kill him in the back of a rented car, and dump the body in a culvert. Remorse? Artie seems incapable of human feeling. But thoughtful, sensitive Judd protests too much: "Murder's nothing! It's just a simple experience. What's one life more or less?"

Soon, of course, the perfect crime collapses into a heap of all-too-human, even childish errors--Judd was so rattled that he dropped his spectacles beside the body of the victim. The boys are questioned, tricked into confession, ordered to trial.

Abruptly, at this point, the character of the film changes. The first 60 minutes add up to a clever psychological thriller, marked and sometimes marred by solemn efforts to see the crime in its social and spiritual setting--as a single pustule in a larger leprosy. The trial, arguing from this evidence, swiftly develops an eloquent though somewhat overextended plea for the abolition of the death penalty. The film rises to a memorable peroration in the words of Clarence Darrow (Orson Welles), as he asks the court to temper justice with mercy, sentence his clients to life in prison. "Life!" he cries. "Any cry for more goes back to the hyena."*

The film's philosophy is open to debate, its psychiatry to ridicule, but its actors are open only to ovation. Orson Welles, frazzle-pated, barrel-bellied, hollow-eyed, creates a fetching caricature of the great trial lawyer, all fustian and a yard wide. Bradford Dillman, the Straus-Loeb, is alarmingly screw loose and frenzy free. But it is Dean Stockwell, as Steiner-Leopold, who dominates the drama. His intensity and insight do much to explain the character's homosexuality, do something to clarify his fearful crime.

*Life they got. Loeb was killed (TIME, Feb. 10, 1936) in Stateville Prison in a razor fight that apparently started with a homosexual assault. Leopold was paroled last year (TIME, March 24, 1958) at the age of 53, is now working as a laboratory technician in a Puerto Rico hospital.

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