Compulsion

It's Chicago and the year is 1924. Two young men are driving recklessly at night, and almost hit a drunken pedestrian. They are wealthy law students, the flamboyant Artie Straus (Bradford Dillman) constantly goading the intensely introverted Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell) to still more outrageous escapades. Smugly feeling safe in their own superiority, the pair commit murder--just to show they can. So starts this gripping fictionalized version of the Leopold-Loeb case which shocked Americans and provoked Clarence Darrow, here fictionalized as Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles), to make an impassioned plea that even these cold killers should not be hung. (official distributor synopsis)