Crime et châtiment (1935)
Directed by Pierre Chenal

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.

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...