Compulsion

“Sometimes murder is just a way to pass the time.”

Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell) and Arthur Straus (Bradford Dillman) are close friends who plan a flawless crime, and then one of them leaves his glasses at the scene. Richard Fleischer follows the boys as District Attorney Harold Horn (E.G. Marshall) closes in. The film puts two young men's belief in their own superiority on trial, and it keeps the question plain: what they did, and who they thought they were.