It was a hot theme in postwar 40s-50s cinema due to many factors, probably because filmmakers were revisiting Neitzche's ubermensch with the hindsight of the holocaust. My fave treatments of the subject are Hitchcock's Rope (1948), Bresson's Pickpocket (1959) and of course Compulsion (1959). Compulsion gave it an original spin by first showing us the horror of amorality but suddenly in the last half making us sympathetic toward the murderers by pointing out that the death penalty is an equally flawed Neitzschian ideal--giving a judge (ubermensch) the right to kill. It ties in nicely with the scene in the beginning where Dean Stockwell alleges that Moses was above the law ("thou shalt not kill" and all that). Complex and thought provoking if you take it at that level.

So it's hard for me to group this as just a rich kid crime story; that's just the tease. Once Orson Welles shows up it goes into totally different territory, more along the lines of Fritz Lang's M or Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder - films that expose the hypocrisy of human "eye for an eye" justice. Fantastic film with exceptional performances by Orson Welles & Dean Stockwell.