American Notebook: Popular Taste and the Agonies of the Young

Within recent months the Leopold-Loeb murder case has served as the theme of a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, novels by Meyer Levin, James Yaffe and MaryCarter Roberts, a paperback case history, and a Broadway dramatization of Mr. Levin’s most successful and fascinating Compulsion. Superficially, it would seem obvious that this terrible murder and its aftermath—a sensational courtroom trial involving two wealthy, brilliant, wayward boys, the most successful criminal lawyer in the country, and a battery of conflicting psychiatrists—should prove magnetically attractive to writers. But thirty-three years have elapsed since the kidnap-murder, and we are surely entitled to wonder why the novelists of the 20’s, the 30’s, or the 40’s did not seize on this drama. Inevitably too a parallel question arises: why now the Leopold-Loeb case rather than the Sacco-Vanzetti case?

The answers to these questions are interrelated. For many of us both Leopold-Loeb and Sacco-Vanzetti have now come to represent two crucial illuminations of American life in the 20s. And if numerous writers and their publics are currently intrigued with that era (for reasons beyond the scope of this brief discusion), the fastening on one sensational trial rather than on the other should be ‘fairly clear to us in the 50’s. The Sacco-Vanzetti trial was an ending; the Leopold Loeb case a beginning. It is not just that Sacco and Vanzetti were in all likelihood completely inn...