Swoon (1992)
Directed by Tom Kalin
Teenagers Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb share a dangerous sexual bond and an amoral outlook on life. They spend afternoons breaking into storefronts and engaging in petty crimes, until the calculating Nathan ups the ante by kidnapping, and murdering, a young boy.
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What critics compared Swoon to
This story was filmed again as Compulsion (1959) and Swoon (1992).
Ellen Kuras' gorgeous black-and-white cinematography does much to enhance Kalin's expressionistic style, which deliberately distances itself from the more straightforward, psychological emphasis of other films about this infamous pair (Compulsion, Hitchcock's Rope).
Rope located the roots of fascism in Nietzschean discourse.
If you come away wanting to see more of the murderous duo, you can add Compulsion (1959, Richard Fleischer) and Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock) to your Netflix queue; the latter was inspired by the pair's exploits.
The case has been made into two previous movies - Alfred Hitchcock's " Rope " (1948) and Richard Fleisher's "Compulsion" (1959), but both to one degree or another played down the topic of homosexuality.
Killer Films, which nursed Kill Your Darlings through its long development, also deserves credit for supporting Krokidas with its own expertise in movies based on real-life incidents involving queerness and murder, Kimberly Peirce ’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) being notable examples.
The direction by Tom Kalin (“Swoon”), working from Howard A. Rodman’s adaptation of Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson’s book, is fluid and occasionally compelling.
Director Tom Kalin ("Swoon") manages the difficult feat of being shocking without becoming sensationalistic.
His debut, "Swoon" (1992), was based on the case of Leopold and Loeb, wealthy young students who kidnapped and killed a boy in 1924.
Kalin contemplated the Leopold-Loeb case with arch moodiness in his 1992 debut Swoon, and has not expanded his cinematic vocabulary in the 16 years since: The most shocking thing about Savage Grace is its flatness, the leadenness of its symbolism (stuffed animals, a dead dog's collar, little boys shooting empty bottles) and the squandering of Moore's dedicated search for vestiges of human flesh in her character's vampiristic skeleton.
But director Tom Kalin (Swoon) distills its most sordid ingredients into a heady brew that hits you like a stun gun.
“Savage Grace” is the juicy screen version of those events, and director Tom Kalin (“Swoon”) treats the nightmare with a perfect pitch of melodrama and hysterics, easing into the discomfort of obscene sexual violation.