MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case has served as inspiration for at least four Hollywood feature films: Rope (1948), Compulsion (1959), Swoon (1992), and Murder by Numbers (2002). Far from remakes of an original text, each film was a product of the era of its release and its creative influences. Rope was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and focused on the murders’ brazen act of hosting a party for their victim’s relatives with the body hidden in the same room. Compulsion’s emphasis was on the investigation and trial of the pair, including Orson Welles as defense attorney. Swoon was the only film of the four to openly represent the pair as lovers in a narrative punctuated by passages from Nathan Leopold’s diaries and trial transcripts. Both Rope and Compulsion were constrained by the Hollywood production code that precluded inclusion of openly gay characters in studio films.

In Murder by Numbers, the suspects are represented as straight; their motivation seems an odd conflation of the Nietzshcian philosophy that influenced Leopold and Loeb and the manipulative relationship between a wealthy scion of an influential family (as Richard Loeb was) and the brilliant introvert attracted to his popularity. Subplots in the film include an additional murder (initially thought to be a suicide) and the marital abuse in the background of a female detective that undergirds her conviction that the pair committed the original murder.

This paper examines the complex relationship between Murder by Numbers’ Justin and Richard characters, arguing that it may be read queerly. The filmmaker’s decision to return the Leopold and Loeb characters to the closet textually seems to signal a regressive oscillation between the waves of New Queer Cinema, given its likely origins in audience targeting and the casting of millennial favorites Ryan Gosling, Ben Chaplin, and Sandra Bullock.