Crime and Punishment (U.)
Directed by Josef Von Sternberg. 1935
Starring Peter Lorre, Edward Arnold, Marian Marsh, Tala Birell, Elisabeth Risdon and Robert Allen. In black and white. 88 mins. Out on Blu-ray and DVD by Arrow Academy.
It may not be quite a crime but Dostoevsky's page-turner takes some fearful punishment in this early adaptation. I'm not going to pretend to have read the book but I'm going to take a punt that it didn't have a happy ending. Somewhere in the contraction of its 500+ pages into less than an hour and a half so much has been stripped away that the events on screen seem almost incoherent, a simplistic melodrama about a man who commits a murder and then feels bad about it.
Von Sternberg is known as the man who made Dietrich, and was just coming off a run of seven films made with Marlene. Now he was forced to swap her for Lorre, who was making his first American film. The diminutive, bug-eyed Hungarian is not perhaps the obvious choice to play Raskolnikov, who is supposed to be young and handsome, but there is one way in which he is perfectly cast: nobody can do Guilty like Peter Lorre. He looks like he was born trying to cover something up.
His performance though is too erratic to convince and the script doesn't have enough time to flesh him out. Most of the other performers are cardboard cutouts of their characters though Edward Arnold is fun as the police inspector.
Extras
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation, transferred from original film elements The original lossless mono soundtrack Isolated music and effects track Light And Dark, a newly-filmed appreciation by David Thompson, critic and director of Josef von Sternberg: The Man Who Made Dietrich The Double Face of Peter Lorre (1984), an hour-long German TV documentary directed by Harun Farocki Mystery In The Air: Crime And Punishment, a 1947 radio adaptation with Lorre reprising the role of Raskolnikov Image gallery Reversible sleeve featuring original artwork
FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Adrian Martin
Directed by Josef Von Sternberg. 1935
Starring Peter Lorre, Edward Arnold, Marian Marsh, Tala Birell, Elisabeth Risdon and Robert Allen. In black and white. 88 mins. Out on Blu-ray and DVD by Arrow Academy.
It may not be quite a crime but Dostoevsky's page-turner takes some fearful punishment in this early adaptation. I'm not going to pretend to have read the book but I'm going to take a punt that it didn't have a happy ending. Somewhere in the contraction of its 500+ pages into less than an hour and a half so much has been stripped away that the events on screen seem almost incoherent, a simplistic melodrama about a man who commits a murder and then feels bad about it.
Von Sternberg is known as the man who made Dietrich, and was just coming off a run of seven films made with Marlene. Now he was forced to swap her for Lorre, who was making his first American film. The diminutive, bug-eyed Hungarian is not perhaps the obvious choice to play Raskolnikov, who is supposed to be young and handsome, but there is one way in which he is perfectly cast: nobody can do Guilty like Peter Lorre. He looks like he was born trying to cover something up.
His performance though is too erratic to convince and the script doesn't have enough time to flesh him out. Most of the other performers are cardboard cutouts of their characters though Edward Arnold is fun as the police inspector.
Extras
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation, transferred from original film elements The original lossless mono soundtrack Isolated music and effects track Light And Dark, a newly-filmed appreciation by David Thompson, critic and director of Josef von Sternberg: The Man Who Made Dietrich The Double Face of Peter Lorre (1984), an hour-long German TV documentary directed by Harun Farocki Mystery In The Air: Crime And Punishment, a 1947 radio adaptation with Lorre reprising the role of Raskolnikov Image gallery Reversible sleeve featuring original artwork
FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Adrian Martin
