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Staging the pawnbroker's murder was one of the assignments at Eisenstein's directing class, Josef von Sternberg aces it with a fire-poker, an offscreen thud, and Peter Lorre's trembling eyeballs. (It plays, like the rest of the film, as a striking midpoint between La Chienne and Scarlet Street.) Raskolnikov emerges out of the faceless collegiate mass with the full promise of brilliance, in the next sequence he uses a glowing review of his thesis to stuff the hole in his shoe. With Napoleon and Beethoven portraits in a bare flat, "the impulse to commit a crime" for the penniless Übermensch is a matter of putting theory to practice. He meets Sonya (Marian Marsh) at the pawnshop, where the avaricious owner (Mrs. Patrick Campbell) takes the girl's Bible (one ruble) and his graduation watch (ten rubles). The bludgeoning of the crone is "a service to humanity" in his own mind, a flush of elation punctuates the ensuing nausea and paranoia: Having demanded money and fame for his work, Raskolnikov enjoys the screwball putdown of a pompous family suitor (Gene Lockhart), squashed top hat and all. "What's all the rumpus? Someone giving birth to an idea?" Germanic views of Russian dilemmas, the starkest distillate of Dostoevsky from the screen's lushest expressionist. Inspector Porfiry (Edward Arnold) keeps things implacably avuncular until an innocent's confession spoils his pursuit, Lorre then switches from sweaty anxiety to mocking insouciance as if changing fur coats. "What do you think? You're the jury." The director would dismiss the project as a mere assignment, yet Tala Birell's shifts of emotion before a tenacious old lover (Douglass Dumbrille) and the irony of redemption reflected at night on a shimmering stream are pure Sternberg. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard. With Elisabeth Risdon, Robert Allen, and Thurston Hall. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |