"Actor: Daniel Schlachet"

• Swoon | DVD | (28/09/2009) from £8.45   |  Saving you £7.54 (89.23%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Tom Kalin directed this black-and-white study of the infamous Leopold and Loeb case a case told before in two previous films -- Rope (Alfred Hitchcock 1948) and Compulsion (1959 starring Orson Welles). In 1924 in Chicago Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb two 18-year-olds kidnapped and murdered the 13-year-old Bobby Franks immediately killing him and then stuffing his naked body up a culvert. The motive for the crime was simply that they wanted to prove to themselves that they were smart enough to get away with it. The previous film versions downplayed Leopold and Loeb's homosexuality but Kalin's version explores their possible psychosexual motivations. Loeb (Daniel Schlachet) is calculating intellectual while Leopold (Craig Chester) the amateur ornithologist is emotional and weak. In love with Loeb Leopold is willing to do anything for him and when Leob uses the withholding of sex as a prompt Leopold is even willing to commit murder to have his sexual desires satisfied by Loeb. Swoon is a chilling yet fascinating film.

• Swoon | DVD | (23/04/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Tom Kalin's Swoon gives the truest account yet of one of the 20th century's most notorious crimes: The 1924 thrill-kill murder of a 13-year-old boy in south-side Chicago by genius college students and lovers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. It's the same story that inspired Hitchcock's Rope and Meyer Levin's novel Compulsion but Swoon forces its driving homoeroticism into the daylight (not to mention the Jewishness of both killers and victim). Featuring the legendary Ron Vawter as the prosecuting state's attorney Swoon flexes its brainy elegance to question the queerness of the case and even extends the story to reveal how each of the imprisoned duo met his eventual death. A former member of New York's ACT UP and the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury Kalin is bracingly indifferent to the tyranny of positive images where same-sex desire is concerned and Swoon in its defiance and its lyrical intelligence stands peerless within the last century's queerly-inclined cinema.