Film Review
Crime et châtiment is
one of the overlooked masterpieces of 1930s French cinema, an early and
almost faultless adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's celebrated 1866
novel
Crime and Punishment.
One of the reasons for the film's comparative obscurity is that it was
released in the same year as Josef von Sternberg's better known
American adaptation which starred Peter Lorre and Edward
Arnold. The French version appears to have been heavily
influenced by an earlier silent adaptation
Raskolnikow (1923) from the
renowned German filmmaker Robert Wiene, whose best-known work -
Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari
(1920) - is powerfully evoked in this film's staging of the pivotal
murder scene.
This first French version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel was directed by
Pierre Chenal, the first important film he made having started out as a
documentary filmmaker. Chenal would later direct
Le
Dernier tournant (1939), cinema's earliest adaptation of
James M. Cain's thriller novel
The
Postman Always Rings Twice. Although he was active as a
film director for four decades (including a four year
stint in Argentina during WWII), Chenal made fewer than thirty films
and had a largely undistinguished career. His
Crime et châtiment is
undoubtedly his best work, a far more inspired
piece than his subsequent literary adaptation
L'Homme de nulle part
(1937). Georges Lampin directed a subsequent (less impressive)
version of
Crime and Punishment in
1956, starring Jean Gabin and Robert Hossein.
There are several things which, taken together, help to make this one
of most accomplished French films of the 1930s. First and
foremost, it brings together two of the great stars of French cinema of
the decade, Pierre Blanchar and Harry Baur, who had previously appeared
opposite one another in Anatole Litvak's
Cette vieille canaille
(1933). The casting of Blanchar (as Raskolnikov) and Baur (as
Porphyre, the killer's nemesis and moral saviour) is inspired and could
hardly be improved on. Dostoyevsky's novel is fundamentally about a
man's struggle with his conscience and his attempts to purge his
guilt. Blanchar conveys this inner conflict superbly and delivers
a performance (one of his finest) which is almost too harrowing to
watch - it seizes our attention right from the outset and never lets
go, drawing us ever deeper into the protagonist's troubled soul.
Baur is every bit as compelling and his portrayal is distinguished by
its subtlety and humanity - we have no doubt that Porphyre not only
knows Raskolnikov is the murderer, he also knows something of the
killer's crisis of conscience. There is something of the
Lieutenant Columbo in Baur's persistent but unobtrusive Porphyre.
Instead of actively pursuing a man he knows to be guilty, he plays a
more passive role, content merely to partake in gentle psychological
games that will inevitably lead the criminal to deliver himself up to
justice. Notice the obvious similarities with Baur's earlier
portrayal of Inspector Maigret in Julien Duvivier's
La Tête d'un homme (1933),
which is no more than a modern reinterpretation of Dostoyevsky's novel.
The two other notable elements of the film are its visual composition
and score, which contribute much to its oppressive mood without
diminishing the power of the central performances. The film
was photographed by Joseph-Louis Mundwiller, an important but
relatively little known cinematographer who started out working on
short films in Russia before gravitating towards some of the most
important French films of the silent era, including Abel Gance's
Napoléon
(1927) and Raymond Bernard's
Le Joueur d'échecs
(1927). That Mundwiller was a great fan of German
expressionism is at once evident in the sequence leading up to and
including the gruesome murder scene, in which Raskolnikov brutally
hacks to death two women with a borrowed axe. The confined sets
are swathed in huge menacing shadows which create an aura of impending
doom, in the fashion of the classic film noir.
Unconventional camera angles and voyeuristic tracking shots add to the
chilling dreamlike-feel of the sequence, which (along with Arthur
Honegger's eerie score) slowly builds the tension towards a terrifying
crescendo. When the anticipated climax comes, the stylistic
camerawork and thunderous music are instantly expunged and we are
suddenly confronted with the cold reality of a premeditated and
pointless murder. Raskolnikov's crime takes place in what feels
like an interminable moment of deathly silent detachment, something
that makes it appear even more shocking and brutal than it is.
Once the deed has been done, once Raskolnikov becomes aware of the
moral Rubicon he has crossed, the nightmare-like subjectivity returns
and we share the killer's terror as, like a hunted animal, he seeks to
make his escape from the seemingly impregnable tomb he has created for
himself. For the remainder of the film, Mundwiller wisely employs
a far less stylised approach, allowing the principal actors to create
the tension and menace themselves without the need for expressionistic
artifice. From time to time, the subjective camera makes a
return, to underscore Raskolnikov's mental deterioration and the frenzy
of his inner turmoil. The bext example of this is the sequence in
which the killer first comes to regard Porphyre as his judge.
Baur's electrifying presence is amplified to a terrifying degree by a
low-angle close-up which confers on him an almost godlike power.
These excursions into pronounced, almost theatrical stylisation only
work because they are used sparingly, so as not to undermine the
realism and authenticity which Chenal seeks to invest in his
film.
One of the strengths of this version of
Crime and Punishment is that it
does not attempt to adapt the whole of Dostoyevsky's substantial tome
but it instead concentrates on the essentials. It abridges the
protracted beginning in which Raskolnikov first conceives his insane
notion and ends at the crucial point in the story when the student
finally acknowledges his guilt and gives himself up to justice.
The novel's epilogue is truncated to a short montage sequence in which
Raskolnikov's long-awaited atonement and his beloved Sonia's restored
faith in him are movingly conveyed in a few mere seconds of screen
time. Whilst literary adaptations were quite prevalent in
French cinema during this period, few are as beautifully rendered and
as true to the spirit of the original novel as Pierre Chenal's
Crime et châtiment, a
hauntingly poignant portrayal of a man fighting to regain his soul
having lost it in a moment of inexecrable folly.
© James Travers 2012
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Pierre Chenal film:
L'Alibi (1937)
Film Synopsis
An impulsive young Russian student, Rodion Raskolnikov, believes that
the intellectual class is morally superior to ordinary working class
people and is therefore above the laws that society creates for
itself. To prove his point, he dispassionately beats an old
pawnbroker and her sister to death with an axe, believing that his
conscience will be untroubled by this act. At once he realises
the fallacy of his reasoning and guilt soon begins to take him
over. Raskolnikov has a chance to atone for his crime when he
sees an old man being knocked down by a carriage in the street.
He carries the mortally wounded man to his home and, when he dies, the
student offers money to his widow. He befriends the dead man's
daughter Sonia, a prostitute who, like him, is beset with guilt.
Realising that he must be judged for his crime, Raskolnikov begins to
betray himself to the investigating magistrate, Porphyre. The
latter has no doubt over the student's guilt, but before he can make an
arrest another man confesses to the killings. Raskolnikov can
walk free, but his torment is far from over...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.