Chronicle of a crime retold: Looking for Bobby Franks in the Leopold and Loeb films

This article examines how the victim is depicted in narrative films that retell the story of a famous crime: Nathan Leopold’s and Richard Loeb’s kidnap and murder of Bobby Franks in Chicago in 1924, retold in Rope , Compulsion , Swoon and Murder by Numbers . Socially harmful homophobic discourses largely propelled the significant cultural attention to this case, and with the exception of Swoon the films retell the crime through problematic constructions of homosexuality as criminogenic. Taking a cultural victimology approach my analysis explores the way homophobic discourses not only shape evolving depictions of the culprits (as is established in prior literature) but also the victim, Bobby Franks. I find that the early films Rope and Compulsion exploit Franks’ suffering as a means of generating homophobic affect, and that the later films either critique and interrupt ( Swoon ) or revive ( Murder by Numbers ) this exploitative arrangement. This indicates the contemporary context is polarised, with queer reclaimings of the story such as Swoon vying with backlash retellings and resurgent homophobia. In view of my analysis I argue for the need to foreground the politics of sexuality in victimological approaches to the cultural making of ideal victims.