Crime and Punishment (1923)
Directed by Robert Wiene

Film Review

Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is a landmark in German cinema, its boldly expressionistic design providing a horrifying visual representation of the mental states of the protagonists in a world consumed by fear and mistrust.  German expressionism found its way into other art forms of the time but it is in cinema that it had its greatest impact, a visual style that would influence numerous filmmakers and bring a chilling edge of reality to genre films such as thrillers and horror movies.  It is the power of cinematic expressionism to depict the tortured mental landscape of an individual which Wiene uses so brilliantly in his follow-up to Caligari - Raskolnikow, perhaps the starkest and most disturbing screen adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment.

In common with virtually every film version of Dostoyevsky's great work of literature, Wiene's film trims down the narrative to its bare bones and spends most of its time dwelling on the main character's destructive angst as he wrestles with his guilt and fear after committing a terrible double murder.  A leading light of the Moscow Art Theatre, Gregori Chmara portrays Raskolnikow as a soul in torment, with every gesture and facial movement of his controlled performance emphasised by revealing close-ups .  As in Wiene's subsequent Orlacs Hände (1924), the central protagonist is set up to be a tragic victim of fate, incapable of escaping the destiny that has been allotted him.  It is indeed strange that in the final shot Raskolnikow is framed as a martyr, and how strikingly he resembles Maria Falconetti in Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928).

Sonja, the virtuous prostitute who guides Raskolnikow to his redemption, is a solitary beacon of solace in a world that is visibly warped in its malevolence, the excessively skewed sets and preponderance of heavy, suffocating shadows providing the starkest visual representation of a mind drifting towards insanity.  The film owes its look mostly to André Andrejew, an early assignment in his high-profile career as an art director.  Having made his name in Germany, on films that included G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929), Andrejew worked for a time in France, where his visual flair was only fully exploited on Maurice Tourneur's La Main du diable (1943).  After the war, he settled in America and found work in Hollywood, the slum set of Jean Negulesco's Britannia Mews (1949) being possibly the crowning achievement of his career.  In the simple but eerily stylised sets of Raskolnikow, Andrejew shows us something terrible - what it must be like to see the world through the eyes of a man who is losing his grip on reality.

Film Synopsis

Rodion Raskolnikow is a young Russian student who has written a treatise which argues that there are certain people who should not be bound by the laws of ordinary men and can commit murder if it is for the greater good.  He puts this theory into practice when he brutally kills a mean old pawnbroker and her sister.  Even though another man, a house decorator, is arrested for the murders, Raskolnikow fears his crime will be discovered and becomes anxious when the investigating magistrate shows that he suspects him.  He strikes up a friendship with Sonja, the streetwalking daughter of a retired government official he befriended earlier.  When the latter dies, impoverished by drink, Raskolnikow helps to pay for the funeral, an act which antagonises his own sister.  After he has confessed his crime to Sonja she insists that he must hand himself over to the authorities...