Swoon *** (1992, Daniel Schlachet, Craig Chester) – Classic Movie Review 1526

For his 1992 real-life thriller, writer director Tom Kalin revisits the scene of the crime in the Richard Loeb-Nathan Leopold Jr ‘murder-for-kicks’ case in 1923 Chicago. Kalin’s game plan is an in-your-face, explicitly gay version of the story, in which these two rich-boy gay lovers take pleasure in committing crimes together. They attempt to get away with the perfect murder and decide to kidnap a neighbour’s boy, but things go wrong when Loeb murders the child. The screenplay follows the months before the murder, the investigation, arrest, trial and final fate of the two young men.

It is a provocative, difficult film, shot self-consciously in arty black and white with anachronistic details, and told sparely, coherently and with great power by Kalin. Daniel Schlachet (Loeb) and Craig Chester (Leopold Jr) star as the two gay Jewish 18-year-olds, who are seen provocatively as victims of an intolerant society rather than as the cold, clever, heartless, calculating monsters they appeared in two earlier film versions of the story, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion (1959). Swoon is more realistic than either of these movies, and more challenging, but that comes at a price of it being less entertaining.

However, Chester and Schlachet are excellent, Ellen Kuras’s black-and-white cinematography is striking and Thérèse Déprèz’s set designs make for an outstanding looking production. And the real Leopold and Loeb can be seen in archive footage edited into the film, which were provided by the Chicago Historical Society.

Produced on a low budget of $250,000 for Killer Films by Christine Vachon, this is one of the cornerstones of the intriguingly edgy 90s New Queer Cinema movement.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1526

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Craig Chester (as Nathan Leopold Jr).