Compulsion
“THEIRS WAS THE PERFECT CRIME they thought! They were too sure...too smart...too careful to leave a clue -- but they did! and it exploded -- The shocking story of two teenagers out for kicks...looking for thrills...and finding them!”
Synopsis
Two close friends' carefully crafted plan to commit a perfect crime is ruined when one of them accidentally leaves his glasses behind at the crime scene.
Credits
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How many hands made this film
The scale of the collaboration
Principal cast & crew: 18
These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.
Why a floor?
This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.
Craft leads on file
Edited by William ReynoldsShot by William C MellorScored by Lionel Newman
Box Office
1959 · Box office
⚖️ Fell short of break-even — grossed 1.3× its budget
Why 2.5×?
Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).
Worldwide gross
$1.8M
Also known as
- Der Zwang zum Bösende
- Impulso criminales
- Le Génie du malfr
- Frenesia del delittoit
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Cast & Crew
18 unique people credited
Top billed cast
Orson Welles
as Jonathan Wilk
Dean Stockwell
as Judd Steiner
Diane Varsi
as Ruth Evans
Bradford Dillman
as Arthur A. Straus
E G Marshall
as District Attorney Harold Horn
Martin Milner
as Sid Brooks
Richard Anderson
as Max Steiner
Robert F Simon
as Police Lt. Johnson
Edward Binns
as Tom Daly
Robert Burton
as Charles Straus
Directors
1Writers
2Producers
1Other crew
4Parents Guide
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Where to watch
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