My final post of the year is up, looking at how popular Leopold-Loeb media was this year compared to last, you can check that out here.
Reminder that the Ashland Public Library is putting on a free virtual event: The Trial of Leopold and Loeb — Inside the Criminal Mind, on December 20th at 7pm EST. The talk will be lead by a retired justice, and more information can be found here.
Thrill Maker: The Story of My Musical Thrill Me by Stephen Dolginoff will be released in 2024. More information is available here.
I’ve got some big plans for the new year, and I’m really excited to share them with you all soon! Until then, I hope you’re staying warm and are able to spend some time with people you love.
Hello again and welcome to my annual tradition, where I look back to see what Leopold-Loeb media has been popular this year. We’ll see what properties rose in popularity, which fell, and how the newcomers are stacking up against the seasoned veterans.
After grabbing review/rating numbers from 7 websites and adding it with all the reviews I could find from newspapers and blogs, I’ve crunched the numbers and determined which Leopold-Loeb media is the most popular, the least popular, the best and worst reviewed.
The charts showing the best reviewed media will get a percentage, which is an average of the review scores I’ve found across multiple websites. The charts showing the popularity of the media will have numbers, which is from me adding up every rating I was able to find across several websites and newspapers.
If you’d like to see more about how I tabulated the data, you can skip down here at the end of this post. Otherwise, let’s get to the rankings!
The top ten best reviewed of all Leopold-Loeb media:
Hollow Fires
Past Resort (Minerva Biggs #3)
The Hunting Accident
A Handful of Clients
Leopold and Loeb Files
Arrested Adolescence
Never the Sinner
A Noble Killing
Criminal Minds: True Genius
Crimes of the Century from Leopold and Loeb to OJ Simpson
Hollow Fires and Past Resort traded places from where they ended up last year. Homo Superiors and Thrill Me, which were at places 3 and 4 last year dropped off entirely and the Criminal Minds episode, which was in 5th dropped to 9th. I only counted the top 5 last time, so the rest of this list are new to the party.
Including the above graph just because I find it very funny how much Scream (and the movies in general) dominate the field.
The most popular iterations of all Leopold-Loeb media are:
Scream
Rope (movie)
Funny Games (1997)
Funny Games (2007)
Murder by Numbers
Native Son
(I combined both versions of Funny Games so Native Son could sneak in there)
For Non Fiction the best reviewed are:
The Leopold and Loeb Files
A Handful of Clients
Arrested Adolescence
Crimes of the Century from Leopold and Loeb to OJ Simpson
Murder Among Friends
Compared to last year, Nina Barrett’s The Leopold and Loeb Files jumped up from 4th to 1st, while Candace Flemings Murder Among Friends dropped from 1st to 5th. Everything else on the list is newly featured this year.
The most popular Leopold-Loeb non fiction iterations are:
For the Thrill of It
American Experience: The Perfect Crime
Murder Among Friends
Nothing But the Night
The Crime of the Century
Unsurprisingly, Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of it retains its spot from last year at the top of the pack. Murder Among Friends retains its 3rd place spot, Nothing But the Night moved from 5th to 4th and The Crime of the Century moved from 2nd to 5th. The only newcomer is the documentary, which I didn’t include in last year’s tally.
For fictional books the best reviewed are:
Hollow Fires
Past Resort (Minerva Biggs #3)
The Hunting Accident
A Noble Killing
Compulsion
Compared to last year Hollow Fires and The Hunting Accident traded places, Past Resort maintained it’s 2nd place spot, Compulsion went from 4th to 5th and A Noble Killing is a book only added this year, which kicked Homo Superiors off of the list.
For fictional books the most popular are:
Native Son
These Violent Delights
The Face of Fear
Ice Haven
Hollow Fires
Native Son maintains its lead by a long shot once again, and actually 1st, 2nd and 5th are all the same as last year. Ice Haven moved from 3rd to 4th and newcomer The Face of Fear replaced Witness.
For fictional movies the best reviewed are:
Rope
Funny Games (1997)
Scream
Compulsion
Like Minds/Murderous Intent
This year Compulsion and Rope traded places, Funny Games and Scream retained their places, and Like Minds/Murderous Intent replaced Swoon.
For fictional movies the most popular are:
Scream
Rope
Funny Games (1997)
Funny Games (2007)
Murder by Numbers
Compulsion
(I combined the two Funny Games to get Compulsion in there)
Scream maintains it’s 1st place easily, while Rope and Funny Games (1997) swapped places. The rest of the list remains unchanged.
For theatre the best reviewed are:
Never the Sinner
Thrill Me
Rope
Never the Sinner and Thrill Me traded places this year, and Rope replaced its off-shoot Gin and “It.” Since there were only 7 total theatre productions I was considering and only 4 of them had over 25 ratings, I decided to cap it at a top 3 instead of a top 5, the same as I did last year.
For theatre the most popular are:
Rope
Thrill Me
Never the Sinner
Last year’s winner Compulsion is completely off the board this year, with Rope jumping from 3rd to 1st and Thrill Me maintaining 2nd.
The tv episodes have the same order in terms of popularity and reviews:
Criminal Minds: True Genius
Columbo Goes to College
Law and Order SVU: Uncivilized
Murdoch Mysteries: Big Murderer on Campus
I didn’t rank the TV episodes last year, so this is a totally new list!
2023 Media Popularity
This was a slow year for Leopold and Loeb, there was less buzz than in many previous years. When looking for articles, reviews, books, etc. I only saw 60 that came out this year, compared to 153 from 2022. I anticipate the number will jump next year though, as it will be the 100th anniversary of when the crime was committed.
Thrill Me: 12 Rope (movie): 6 Arrested Adolescence: 5 Nothing But the Night (2022): 4 Murder Among Friends: 3 American Criminals: 2 Compulsion (movie): 2 Jazzed: 2 Murder by Numbers: 2 Compulsion (book): 1 Compulsion (play): 1 Ice Haven: 1 Scream: 1 Swoon: 1
Total: 42
Our champion is the same as last year: Thrill Me is ever popular. I’m not sure why the Rope movie was discussed so often though. Following that are my book, released this year, and more reviews for the non fiction books which were released in 2022. The upcoming movie American Criminals also got in a couple articles, and everything else is an old property that got a review or mention.
Thanks for taking a look at the media popularity with me for this year. If you’d like to know more about how I got these numbers, you can keep reading. Otherwise I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and I’ll talk to you all next year!
Notes on scoring:
Letterboxd only gives a score if the movie has over 100 ratings, so I may have the number of people who reviewed a property but not a rating.
For Rotten Tomatoes I’ll be taking the audience score and they just give a general number for the amount of ratings something has received (example: 10,000+) and that’s what I’ll be using.
IMDB does something similar, tending to round to the nearest hundred, if something has over 1,000 ratings, so those are the numbers I’ll be pulling.
I only take scores if they have more than 10 ratings per platform. So I won’t include a score from a book that has 5 ratings on Good Reads and 5 on Library Thing; they need 10 total on a platform for me to include the rating percentage. I do this because if something gets 1 100% or 1 0% rating, it’s really not giving a clear consensus on what the majority of people think about that property.
When I rank the popularity of a project I’m just going off of the amounts of reviews/ratings I’ve been able to find. I’m not taking box office information into consideration and I don’t have access to publishing numbers. The data does tend to skew towards movies and new books as being more popular. For example, Compulsion (1956) was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year when it was published, but it drags behind in my rankings. So this is more of a look of how popular the media is NOW rather than how popular it was when it was published or released, sometimes over several decades ago.
These scores were gathered on December 9-10, 2023.
Just something I noticed while comparing scores. Amazon is by far the highest, because of the way they weight their review scores. For the books the averages go from highest to lowest: Library Thing, Goodreads, then Storygraph. For the movies it goes Letterboxd, IMDB then Rotten Tomatoes.
58 of the 81 pieces of media I looked at had more than 10 ratings on one platform, so those are the ones who made up the pool of contestants.
Oh, and here’s a little peek behind the curtain at the excel file I keep where all this data came from:
Today’s post is about the communist response to the Leopold-Loeb case, specifically the coverage given to the case by The Daily Worker, a Chicago based communist newspaper.
I’ve got some upcoming speaking events for next year, more information will be provided as they get closer:
April 10th, 2024, in-person and virtual: Talk at the Schaumburg Public Library.
April 14th, 2024, in-person: Talk at the Joliet Historical Museum.
May, 2024, virtual: Presentation for the Illinois Ornithological Society’s speaker’s series.
In other news:
The Black Box Theatre in Moline, Illinois will be holding auditions for Thrill Me on December 10th. The musical will be staged in 2024. More information is available here.
The Ashland Public Library is putting on a free virtual event: The Trial of Leopold and Loeb — Inside the Criminal Mind, on December 20th at 7pm EST. The talk will be lead by a retired justice, and more information can be found here.
The Muncie Civic Theatre in Muncie, Indiana will be performing Never the Sinner on January 26-28 and February 2-4, 2024. Tickets are $15. More information is available here.
When the news about Leopold and Loeb’s murder of Bobby Franks spread around the country, reporters turned it into an allegorical tale about what Leopold, Loeb, their parents and community did wrong to end up in that situation. Today I’d like to focus on this kind of newspaper coverage specifically from communist paper The Daily Worker, which wrote about the case in a way that was unique compared to the more mainstream (or they would say, the capitalist yellow rag) newspapers.
There had been communist papers in the United States before the Worker, but never at this scale. When the paper launched in Chicago in January of 1924 it announced: “The Daily is born! It comes to fight! It comes to inspire and call the many to struggle! The Daily Worker is the voice of the whole working class!”
Despite being based in Chicago, The Daily Worker didn’t report on Bobby’s murder until May 29th, more than a week after his disappearance, and only then to run the article: “PLUTE PRIVATE SCHOOL NEST OF SEX PERVERSION.” In the article they claim that Mott Kirk Mitchell, one of the Harvard School teachers who had been held for questioning “confessed he had been guilty of numerous acts of perversions and that he had been a psychopathic case since the age of seven.” Further, the article claims that Walter Wilson, another teacher also being held for questioning, and a Harvard student accused Mitchell of propositioning them. Truthful or not, the Worker was more interested in exposing the private school as a den of sin than in the still unsolved murder of a 14 year old boy, who was only mentioned twice in the article.
This selective interest shows in the bulk of the Worker‘s coverage of the case through the rest of the year. The Worker‘s first report of Leopold and Loebs confession from June 4th is steeped in its own philosophy and a hatred towards “perversion.”
Following up their previous article they make sure to add that the Harvard School “is reputed to be a nest of perversion” and that Leopold “made an exhaustive study of degeneracy and supplemented the knowledge acquired from books by a varied personal experience.” The article also claims that “Psychiatrists ascribe the motive of the crime not to the ransom theory…but because the two boys, petted and pampered and having nothing to do but satisfy their desires, committed the murder to hide their degeneracy from the public.”
It’s obvious that the Worker was anti-lgbtq, and more comfortable discussing “perversion” openly than other papers. But despite previously being so hostile towards Bobby’s teachers, once Leopold and Loeb confessed they changed their tune, publishing an article attacking the police for the alleged beatings and threats used against Wilson and Mitchell while they were being interrogated. They describe beatings with a rubber hose, physical blows with fists, and the police threatening to throw Wilson out a window and say he committed suicide if he didn’t confess. They even wrote that the police were to blame for spreading the rumor that the teachers were queer, though “there is not one shred of proof even connecting the teachers with any improper sexual practices,” conveniently forgetting that they were one of the most vocal papers making such claims.
Of course the Worker was not only interested in damning queerness, their main target was capitalism. After the sons of millionaires had confessed the Worker opined that:
“This horrible crime dramatically brings the rottenness inherent in capitalist society to the front. On one side of the social scale we have poverty and misery, millions of workers going without enough to eat, children without enough clothes to cover their bodies, mothers undernourished and fathers overworked or unemployed.
On the other side, we have the idle rich, rolling in luxury, produced by the workers, their children brot up surrounded by servants and flunkeys, their smallest want attended to. To them the only problem is to escape boredom. Having no outlet for their normal energies, they turn to dissipation and perversion.
Leopold is the son of a wealthy manufacturer. Loeb is the son of the vice-president of Sears, Roebuck Company. Out of the daily toil, the sweat and the blood of hundreds of children, wage-slaves in the factories of these men, came the wealth that afforded luxuries for their two boys. If young Leopold and his chum Loeb cared nothing for all this, it could not be expected that the taking one one life more would affect them very deeply.”
Though coverage dropped off for a month, it picked back up with the sentencing hearing began, to rail at the coverage by other newspapers. “One and all the big daily newspapers of Chicago and the vicinity are according the most generous treatment to the millionaire youths who have pleaded guilty to one of the most brutal murders in the history of criminology. They are bringing into high light the human side of their characters, making no effort to incite the public to a hanging mood.”
While its contemporaries were publishing several articles every day about the case, the Worker gave it very little space, explaining that “The Daily Worker has published very little about the trial, because it felt the space was needed for other matter[s]. The parasite sons of multi-millionaires have been up for murder before. They usually win their freedom.”
And true to their word, they barely reported on the trial, instead using the time to condemn Leopold and Loeb’s relatives instead. The article “Capitalist Justice Will Not Put These Two Loebs on Trial” lists the many claimed misdeeds of Richard Loeb’s father and uncle, Jacob Loeb having broken up the Chicago teacher’s union, and Albert for his part running the “Sears sweatshop.”
A reporter for the Worker explained this focus:
“I am not so much interested in the verdict that will be rendered by Cheif Justice John R. Caverly, in his silly black robes, dispensing capitalist justice upon the heads of two youthful victims of the social order which he uses all his power to uphold.
But I am interested in the fate that the workers and farmers will mete out to the social order of Judge Caverly and State’s Attorney Crowe, and the condemnation that will fall upon the heads of its chief upholders like Jacob Loeb and Albert H. Loeb.”
Though the Worker‘s first article along this theme was aimed at the Loebs, they hadn’t forgotten about the Leopolds.
In the midst of the trial Daily Worker reporter Karl Reeve went down to Morris, Illinois to investigate the Leopold’s paper/box factory and produced a multi-article series condemning the plant. Reporting on alleged low pay, dangerous work conditions and broken strikes, Reeve claimed that “the citizens of Morris are bitter against Nathan Leopold, not because he is the father of a brutal slayer, but because he has ground the joy out of, the youth, the energy, the fresh and innocent girlhood out of 500 of the town’s young people.” These articles continued for a week, and the last, apparently running out of ammo, was: “New Leopold Crimes Exposed: Father’s Slaves Used by ‘Babe’ to Kill Birds”
“Babe used to come to Morris to hunt,” said Joe Harrington, “He always hunted birds. He was fond of them. But Babe himself couldn’t hit a barn door. He didn’t know a thing about hunting. Babe hated more than anything else to admit to his friends his inferiority in any line.
Babe had the idea that being a rich man’s son made him superior to ordinary human beings. He would come down to his father’s factory, go around and pick out the men who were crack shots, and take them away from the machines to go out and hunt for him. Babe would collect the birds his father’s workers shot, send the men back to work, and then take the birds up to Chicago with him, boasting to his rich friends there what a good shot he is.”
It was not stated who Harrington was or if he worked at Morris. And even if it was true, it seems a weak end to a week long series of articles about deaths, crushed hands and horrible working conditions.
I tried to research some of the many many claims the Worker made against the Morris Paper Mill in its exposé series and I could find nothing. No deaths or mutilations, strikes, not even a negative association with the plant. I found one article about workers finding a severed hand in a bale of paper in 1916, but nothing about accidents at the mill itself.
Going through oral history accounts, Morris residents seem to remember the Mill with fondness. The Mill was the town’s main employer for over 50 years and it seems that almost everyone in Morris had a family member at one time who was employed by the company, and the little city apparently suffered greatly when it closed in the 1980s.
After the series on the Morris Paper Mill, the paper had promised it would do a similar series on Sears and the skeletons in Albert Loeb’s closet, but it never did. There had been one short article about both Albert and Jacob Loeb and negative jabs at Sears throughout the coverage, but nowhere near as much vitriol was directed at the Loebs as there had been against the Leopolds. Perhaps interest waned, perhaps another story took precedent, or they couldn’t find enough material. Or maybe someone close to the family encouraged them to drop it.
Loebs Get Excitement in Communism and Killing, Chicago Daily Journal
Moritz J. Loeb, Richard Loeb’s first cousin, had been a member of the communist party for several years by the time his family name was making headlines. Moritz was the son of Julius and Emma Loeb, born in 1896 and raised in Chicago before going to school at Cornell. He had been the secretary for the Labor Defense Council, which raised legal funds for those involved in cases that interested them, typically involving labor or union struggles, including the Sacco and Vanzetti case. According to a Chicago Daily Journal interview with Moritz, he joined the Communist party in 1920 and became friends with John Louis Engdahl, who had edited a previous Communist paper, and William Dunne. The three decided the nation needed a daily Communist paper, and they rented office space and began the Worker. Moritz was The Daily Worker‘s business manager while his cousin was being tried for murder.
When a reporter from the Journal came to his office, he found Moritz “to be a pleasant, keen member of the intelligentsia.” When asked about the Franks murder Mortiz replied: “I refuse absolutely to allow my name to be published in connection with the Franks case because I do not want to take advantage of the Loeb family to talk about it.” The reporter skirted this by asking: “Suppose communism ruled the world, what would you do to young Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb for the murder they committed?”
“They would not have committed that crime,” he replied.
“Why not?”
“Because communism would give them ideals and a purpose in life.”
“What does communism say about the murder of Robert Franks?”
“Communism says that the crime is the natural result of a sick society. Cure society and you cure crime.”
While Moritz seemed uncomfortable discussing the Franks case too directly and possibly protected his uncle Albert from scrutiny, the Worker‘s coverage of the case wasn’t over yet.
On August 6th Daily Worker editor and co-founder J. Louis Engdahl went to the Cook County Jail to speak with the defendants. According to the Worker, “the reporters for the Chicago capitalistic papers” didn’t want to interview the pair with the Worker reporter present. “We are just after feature stuff,” Engdahl quotes another reporter as telling him, “Leopold probably has a grudge against the Daily Worker and if we go in with you Leopold may get sore and refuse to talk. We just want to kid with the boys.”
Engdahl was able to get in eventually, and as it happened the “capitalist” reporters needn’t have worried about Leopold holding a grudge, it seems that he hadn’t seen anything of the paper or its tirades against his father. When told which paper Engdahl worked for he asked: “’The Daily Worker is that radical newspaper isn’t it? Do they say anything about us?’ When told that it considered him as a representative of the idle rich, born into a family of labor exploiters he said, ‘Well, that’s all right, that’s a new angle on the case. Send me some of the papers, will you. The other papers have not touched on that phase yet.’”
Engdahl apparently spoke mostly to Leopold, only quoting Loeb once as saying: “I may have done a little work occasionally, but I never had a regular job. I never worked for wages.” Leopold was more inclined to play with the new reporter, explaining that “Socialism is in conflict with my philosophy and I am not interested in it.” When asked questions about his father’s business practices he said: “I refuse to answer on advice of counsel, but I assure you I am not at all interested in social uplift. I believe that each individual should take care of himself.”
When Leopold was asked: “But what’s the point? What moral do you draw from the story of the class nature of society?”
“Am I the one to draw a moral? I never draw morals.” He said with a smile.
After this burst of interest, the paper gave little more coverage to the hearing, other than short, sarcastic articles describing the trial every few days. But it came back with a vengeance once the sentence was read.
“Gold Saves Rich Killers’ Lives” the front page screamed. The Worker had been predicting the pair wouldn’t hang from their first article about the case. To them, a life sentence was inevitable, and again they turned their focus from the teenagers to their parents. They were more concerned that
“The house of Sears, Roebuck and Co…still hires its girl-slaves at the pittance of $17 a week, and put them on the street when they are no longer needed. The box factories of Nathan Leopold’s father at Morris, Illinois, are still wearing down the bodies of boys of twelve who have been forced to lie in order that their families might not starve, are catching them in monster machines when they are too tired to be alert, are mangling them and torturing them. Profits are still being ground out for the Leopolds, for the Loebs, and for the Franks family. And Chief Justice Caverly is satisfied that ‘justice’ has been done.”
Unlike most other newspapers from the time, which reported on daily interviews with Leopold and Loeb, on their facial features, childhoods, personalities and friendships, the Worker wasn’t interested in Leopold and Loeb themselves. They were simply an inevitable symptom of a much larger problem. Their only value was to be used to convince others that capitalism invariably led to crimes like these, and hopefully inspire change.
If you’d like to do your own research, I recommend the Marxists Internet Archive, which was an incredible resource.
The Lives and Legends of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold 