Film: Vito Project LGBTQ+ Film Club presents Compulsion (1959) 35mm

The Cinema Museum welcomes the return of The Vito Project LGBTQ+ Film Club, a series of regular screenings providing different generations of LGBTQ+ people and allies an alternative safe space to socialise, watch great films and share ideas.

The Vito Project is proud to present its new 2022 Spring season: Re-Opening the Celluloid Closet, a series of screenings exploring the challenging and yet endlessly fascinating ways that classic Hollywood films depicted queer representation under the restraints of the infamous Hays Code. This was a set of self-regulating guidelines dictating what was deemed unacceptable in American movies from 1934-1968 – and homosexuality was on the “highly objectionable” list! Despite this, filmmakers took on the creative challenge to show what couldn’t be shown through veiled subtexts and exploitation.

Based on novelist Meyer Levin’s fictionalised account of the infamous 1924 murder trial of lovers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, The Vito Project is excited to present Compulsion (1959) the rarely screened crime thriller directed by Richard Fleisher and starring Orson Welles, which is being screened on 35mm print courtesy of the BFI.

Close friends Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell) and Artie Strauss (Bradford Dillman) murder a boy in a philosophical exercise in how to commit the perfect crime. Despite their precautions, one of them inadvertently left a key piece of evidence at the crime scene, and they have been arrested and put on trial. It's up to their nationally famous attorney (Welles) to save them.

While names changes were necessary since Leopold was still alive at the time of its, the story provided Hollywood with the perfect sensationalist material to reinforce its tendency to portray gay men as villains. This didn’t prevent Stockwell and Dillman jointly winning (alongside Welles) the Best Actor award at Cannes Film Festival. Less often screened than the other cinematic retellings of the story, Compulsion is a compelling tale that offers a compassionate plea against capital punishment.

The film will be followed by a conversation about the context of its production and the content of the movie.

Doors open at 17.00, for a 18.00 start.

Refreshments will be available in our licensed cafe/bar.