A couple of wealthy, apparently gay aesthetes murder a classmate before throwing a party to which they've invited the victim's parents and their old boarding school teacher, a crude Nietzschean played by James Stewart. The teacher regales the others with his view of murder as an art form.
Hitchcock tried to make it look like it was filmed one continuous take. It didn't work very well. That guy who directed 1917 should do a remake.
I'll give away the ending here.
This likely worked better on stage than in a movie, but Jimmy Stewart instantly turns against all of his long-held views when he discovers the crime. Killing people is bad! He fires a gun out the window to bring the police.
But Stewart hasn't completely reformed. He gloats that his former students will likely be sentenced to death. "You're going to DIE, Cameron!"
Leopold & Loeb themselves were sentenced to life plus 99 years. Three other movies inspired by their case are Compulsion (1959), Murder by Numbers (2002) and the New Queer Cinema's Swoon (1992).
When I was a kid in the '70's, there was an independent TV station that would show Compulsion a couple of times a year. It taught me that even pitiful people might kill you.
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