Crime et châtiment (1935)

Crime et châtiment is a French film first released in 1935, directed by Pierre Chenal.  The film is based on a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and stars Harry Baur, Pierre Blanchar, Madeleine Ozeray, Lucienne Le Marchand and Sylvie.  It has also been released under the title: Crime and Punishment.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


A young Russian student, Raskolnikov, believes that the intellectual classes are morally superior to ordinary working class people.  To prove his point, he brutally kills an old shopkeeper, believing that the act will leave his conscience unscathed.  He is wrong.  Guilt soon takes him over and compels him to surrender himself to his police pursuer, Porphyre.  In jail, he realises that the path to redemption will be a long and painful one to traverse...

The best film adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s classic novel is almost certainly this 1935 work from acclaimed French film director Pierre Chenal.  Intense acting performances from Harry Baur and Pierre Blanchar (two giants of French cinema in the 1930s and 1940s) make this a compelling work, which is made all the more atmospheric by the dark moody sets and cinematography, very redolent of pre-WWII European expressionism.

© James Travers 2003

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