Swoon Movie Review

Swoon is an irritating intellectual exercise allowing filmmaker Tom Kalin to say in his movie what Richard Fleischer and Alfred Hitchcock didn't say in Compulsion and Rope, that Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were homosexuals. Fleischer and Hitchcock didn't have to SAY it, they SHOWED it. How can there be any doubt when you watch the interactions of the two fictional but clearly fact-based characters played by Farley Granger and John Dall in Rope? Any question in your mind as you check out the gnarled relationship of Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman in Compulsion? It wasn't sexual politics that the real names and actual orientations of Leopold and Loeb couldn't be included onscreen; it was the fact that a reformed Leopold was very much alive and litigant right up to his death in 1971. Swoon is the cinematic equivalent of sitting through a dull lecture from a windbag, except for Ellen Kuras’ black-and-white cinematography, which is outstanding. I give it three bones for the cognoscenti, but for me, just

1991 95m/B Daniel Schlachet, Craig Chester, Ron Vawter, Michael Kirby, Michael Stumm, Valda Z. Drabla, Natalie Stanford; D: Tom Kalin; W: Tom Kalin; C: Ellen Kuras; M: James Bennett. Sundance Film Festival ‘92: Best Cinematography. VHS, LV, Closed Caption