Movies: "Crime and Punishment" and "The Man Who Knew Too Much"
We don't have a TV at my place. If I want to watch a movie, I put it on this computer, or use my parents' laptop if a bunch of us all want to crowd around a screen. You can't find everything you want on DVD, though. So I've been having an ongoing midweek film session. If I have a Wednesday or Thursday with nothing else to do in the early evening, I toddle across town to Arkham Women's College and use one of their viewing rooms to watch an old VHS tape from the video store of something obscure that I can't get on DVD. (Sometimes, if I feel like living dangerously, I bring a bag of pretzels, even though the sign says No Food or Drink In Library. What can I say, I enjoy life on the edge.)
Crime and Punishment last week, The Man Who Knew Too Much this week. The first was more fun, but they both had their moments.
About The Man..., it didn't really click for me. I didn't think much of the acting. The kid was good, though. They should have given her a lot more screen time. Most of the good guys seemed weirdly unconvincing; when their daughter has been kidnapped, I don't buy flippant humor and slapstick fight scenes. If the idea was to keep the overall tone light and exciting rather than to be realistic, I suppose it succeeded at that, but I still didn't quite buy most of the characters most of the time. It also featured Peter Lorre as a slithy tove. He did his usual good job, but most of the time his character felt kind of pointless. "Better not say anything about this to the police, or we'll kill your daughter. Oops. You talked. Well, better not let your wife stop the assassin, or we'll really kill your daughter. Oops, she stopped him. Oh, well, don't let the police find out about this, or we'll REALLY kill your daughter, I mean it this time." You know who was a nice surprise, Nurse Archer. Now, she was someone right out of a G.K. Chesterton story: evil, buck-toothed hypnotist cultist. I think she and Abbott win Cutest Couple for this movie. That last comradely hug at the end gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.
C&P was the 1930s black and white version with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, directed by Joseph von Sternberg. It was outrageously unfaithful to the book. It was the pulp-fiction thriller version of C&P written by screenwriters who have only read the Cliffs Notes rather than the Dostoyevsky novel. And it was wonderful. I raved about it a little the other week, but it's worth saying again: the movie is full of stuff that should have happened in the book. One of the reasons the book is such a wrench to read is that there keeps being no emotional crisis, no catharsis. There is this murder, whereafter the murderer can't enjoy himself at all; he was an anxious, miserable young sod before he killed the two women, and afterwards he's still an anxious, miserable young sod.
Not in the movie. Oh, boy. In the movie he's a clever and conceited youth with a huge sense of entitlement, who has pictures of Napoleon and Beethoven glowering from his bedroom walls. (The soundtrack was full of pointless quotations from Beethoven's Fifth. Like a lot of other stuff in the movie, it was very funny and I don't think it was intended to be funny. Every time anything of any significance happened, DUH DUH DUH DUMMMM!) It's amazing what a spot of first-degree murder will do for your inner man. Raskolnikov gains a sudden bizarre burst of confidence, wherein he marches down to his publisher and demands a better contract, then goes out and gets his sister unengaged to a guy who looks like Pooh-Bah. If P.G. Wodehouse had written Crime and Punishment, he'd have come up with someone like Lorre-as-Raskolnikov. I read somewhere that Peter Lorre had always wanted to do a film version of C&P, since he was a fan of the book. He certainly could have found a screenplay with more literary merit, but he couldn't have found a funnier one. It's appallingly oversimplified, but it's so charming that I forgave it much. It's as if he's said, "Screw subtlety and sensitive performances, I did all that in Mad Love and now I'm going for some antiheroic slapstick." (Oh, and PL has very short hair, unfashionably short for the 30s, brushed straight forward. I thought, "Hm, this must have been right after Mad Love," and, by gum, I found out afterwards that I was right--he was growing his hair back in just as fast as he could.)
The movie starts out with a scene that I'm well placed to laugh at. It's a college commencement. The Dean, or whomever he is, gives the usual canned address: "Now as you go forth into the world with your strong, well-honed young minds, you must not be afraid to seize your future with both hands..." It was exactly like what you've heard at any given graduation. The president of MCC gave what sounded like an identical address at my graduation a couple of weeks ago. And then the Dean calls out their top student to be honored by the college: "Roderick Raskolnikov!" (Yeah, I know. They simplified all the patronymics, too. Oh, and they changed the time and place from 1870s Russia to 1930s Anywhere. There was even a portentous opening title, too. "The time of our story is anytime, the place any place where human hearts respond to love and terror, pity and fear." The poetry, it brings tears to my eyes.) And Raskolnikov steps forward, looking awkwardly happy but embarrassed. You see him hugging his mother and sister afterwards; you see him laughing with a friend, the Razmunihin-equivalent character. "Why do women always cry when they're happy?" he will have cause to ask again, later, under sadder circumstances. You see the headline and beginning of that article he wrote for a well-known journal.
And then it's months later, and Raskolnikov is down on his luck and wearing rags and living in a garret. It's like a broom closet full of books, his bed, and his table, and very little else. As they usually say about diplomas, that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee. He was obviously paid in contributor's copies by the journal; he picks up one copy, laughs a little, and then folds it up and shoves it inside his boot to cover a giant hole in the sole. (He's still pretty chubby for a guy who supposedly doesn't know where his next meal is coming from, but he's cute that way. I like 'em plump.) This Raskolnikov may be a starving and neglected intellectual, alienated from society, but at least he enjoys himself, ticking off the abusive harridan of a landlady and strutting around like a little ragged Napoleon. There's a nice moment when he puts on his old jacket and one entire sleeve lining falls out. He twirls it around his fingers and sticks it into his pocket like a display handkerchief.
They went to great lengths to make the pawnbroker an unsympathetic character, as I said before. In fact, she's played by an old lady who looks and sounds exactly like my maternal grandmother, an unpleasant woman at the best of times. The resemblance is so strong it's scary. We first see Sonia when she and Raskolnikov wind up at the pawnshop--she to try and get a little money on her family Bible, he to put his graduation-present pocket watch up the spout. In a rather cute and touching wordless scene, they stand around outside the apartment door, glancing at one another awkwardly and avoiding direct eye contact. Then she's cross-questioned and insulted by the troll-like old pawnbroker, while Raskolnikov has to stand there and listen.
Sonia was quite well done. I was initially sure they had just picked her out because they wanted a girl who was shorter than Raskolnikov, but she was pretty good on her own merits: tough and hurt. The actress was laboring under a rather stupid change from the book to the movie. In the book, Sonia is the moral compass for Raskolnikov. He has a last chance to weasel out of confessing at the end, but he can't back out because he knows Sonia is watching and he doesn't want to disappoint her. Well, in the movie they have her collapse under the strain of loving a guy who is likely to spend years in the federal pen, and she abandons all her moral qualms and tells him he should flee the country, never mind atoning for the murder he committed. This means that Raskolnikov gets to be the strong, righteous figure at the end who makes the decision all on his own, without the help of some chick. Of course, I hated the change. Sonia was fine up to there, though. There was a good moment outside her seedy apartment by the canal:
Sonia: Isn't it beautiful... On clear nights you can see all the stars reflected in the water, and I sometimes feel as if I could reach down and dip up a bucket full of stars.
Raskolnikov: You're lonely.
Sonia: So are you.
Strangely enough, Peter Lorre and Marian Marsh didn't have much chemistry together. Okay, Raskolnikov doesn't have a sex life in the book, either, but you'd think they would throw a few clinches into the movie. No such luck. He does wind up bawling on her knees, of course, but it's just not the same.
This cast picture turned up while I was trying and failing to find a photo of the pawnbroker, and it's oddly cute. From left to right: Sonia, Razmunihin, Raskolnikov (his body language is a clue towards the subtlety level of this movie), Svidgrailov, Porfiry ("Peter" in the movie) Petrovitch, and Raskolnikov's mom and sister. The last two did an excellent job in thankless roles; Dunya gets a lot less stage time than in the book, but what she does get is all good. One of the most enjoyable small touches is the relationship between Raskolnikov and his sister. Her name has been Westernized to "Antonia", and he calls her "Toni". They tease each other, they love one another, and she's obviously never stopped seeing him as her bratty but adorable little brother. She's about half a head taller than he is, but that just points up their relative maturity levels. By the way, I'm very fond of sibling characters in fiction generally. Being an only child, I like the trope of someone your own age who has had virtually the same experiences as yourself but is interestingly different.
The guy who played Petrovitch was the real surprise for me. Of course PL did a smashing job, but by now I'm starting to take it for granted he'll be the most interesting thing about any given movie. What is rarer is a co-player who can stand up to him. Lorre's so very fun to watch that unless the other actors have a lot of presence, they kind of disappear next to him. He is the garlic goat cheese salad of the acting profession--whatever you put near him in the fridge will start to taste like him, unless it has a robust flavor of its own. (I must be hungry.) Edward Arnold stands up to him with ease. (The two of them even got this cool poster art.) He was pretty much Petrovitch as presented in the book--extremely genial, fat and getting on in years and fond of a drink, presenting himself as terribly honest, kindhearted, and a little dense, then stalking in on his quarry like an experienced old killer.
You know who the two of them reminded me of? Ko-Ko versus the Mikado.
Raskolnikov: *bluster*cringe*evade* I wasn't there! And even if I was there, I wouldn't be such a duffer as to miss all the money hidden in the mattress!
Petrovitch: Come, come, my friend, I don't suspect you one bit! Except for the part where I do. But you'll probably get time off of Siberia if you make a direct confession. Suppose we jail you after lunch.
Raskolnikov: I don't want any lunch.
Crime and Punishment last week, The Man Who Knew Too Much this week. The first was more fun, but they both had their moments.
About The Man..., it didn't really click for me. I didn't think much of the acting. The kid was good, though. They should have given her a lot more screen time. Most of the good guys seemed weirdly unconvincing; when their daughter has been kidnapped, I don't buy flippant humor and slapstick fight scenes. If the idea was to keep the overall tone light and exciting rather than to be realistic, I suppose it succeeded at that, but I still didn't quite buy most of the characters most of the time. It also featured Peter Lorre as a slithy tove. He did his usual good job, but most of the time his character felt kind of pointless. "Better not say anything about this to the police, or we'll kill your daughter. Oops. You talked. Well, better not let your wife stop the assassin, or we'll really kill your daughter. Oops, she stopped him. Oh, well, don't let the police find out about this, or we'll REALLY kill your daughter, I mean it this time." You know who was a nice surprise, Nurse Archer. Now, she was someone right out of a G.K. Chesterton story: evil, buck-toothed hypnotist cultist. I think she and Abbott win Cutest Couple for this movie. That last comradely hug at the end gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.
C&P was the 1930s black and white version with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, directed by Joseph von Sternberg. It was outrageously unfaithful to the book. It was the pulp-fiction thriller version of C&P written by screenwriters who have only read the Cliffs Notes rather than the Dostoyevsky novel. And it was wonderful. I raved about it a little the other week, but it's worth saying again: the movie is full of stuff that should have happened in the book. One of the reasons the book is such a wrench to read is that there keeps being no emotional crisis, no catharsis. There is this murder, whereafter the murderer can't enjoy himself at all; he was an anxious, miserable young sod before he killed the two women, and afterwards he's still an anxious, miserable young sod.
Not in the movie. Oh, boy. In the movie he's a clever and conceited youth with a huge sense of entitlement, who has pictures of Napoleon and Beethoven glowering from his bedroom walls. (The soundtrack was full of pointless quotations from Beethoven's Fifth. Like a lot of other stuff in the movie, it was very funny and I don't think it was intended to be funny. Every time anything of any significance happened, DUH DUH DUH DUMMMM!) It's amazing what a spot of first-degree murder will do for your inner man. Raskolnikov gains a sudden bizarre burst of confidence, wherein he marches down to his publisher and demands a better contract, then goes out and gets his sister unengaged to a guy who looks like Pooh-Bah. If P.G. Wodehouse had written Crime and Punishment, he'd have come up with someone like Lorre-as-Raskolnikov. I read somewhere that Peter Lorre had always wanted to do a film version of C&P, since he was a fan of the book. He certainly could have found a screenplay with more literary merit, but he couldn't have found a funnier one. It's appallingly oversimplified, but it's so charming that I forgave it much. It's as if he's said, "Screw subtlety and sensitive performances, I did all that in Mad Love and now I'm going for some antiheroic slapstick." (Oh, and PL has very short hair, unfashionably short for the 30s, brushed straight forward. I thought, "Hm, this must have been right after Mad Love," and, by gum, I found out afterwards that I was right--he was growing his hair back in just as fast as he could.)
The movie starts out with a scene that I'm well placed to laugh at. It's a college commencement. The Dean, or whomever he is, gives the usual canned address: "Now as you go forth into the world with your strong, well-honed young minds, you must not be afraid to seize your future with both hands..." It was exactly like what you've heard at any given graduation. The president of MCC gave what sounded like an identical address at my graduation a couple of weeks ago. And then the Dean calls out their top student to be honored by the college: "Roderick Raskolnikov!" (Yeah, I know. They simplified all the patronymics, too. Oh, and they changed the time and place from 1870s Russia to 1930s Anywhere. There was even a portentous opening title, too. "The time of our story is anytime, the place any place where human hearts respond to love and terror, pity and fear." The poetry, it brings tears to my eyes.) And Raskolnikov steps forward, looking awkwardly happy but embarrassed. You see him hugging his mother and sister afterwards; you see him laughing with a friend, the Razmunihin-equivalent character. "Why do women always cry when they're happy?" he will have cause to ask again, later, under sadder circumstances. You see the headline and beginning of that article he wrote for a well-known journal.
And then it's months later, and Raskolnikov is down on his luck and wearing rags and living in a garret. It's like a broom closet full of books, his bed, and his table, and very little else. As they usually say about diplomas, that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee. He was obviously paid in contributor's copies by the journal; he picks up one copy, laughs a little, and then folds it up and shoves it inside his boot to cover a giant hole in the sole. (He's still pretty chubby for a guy who supposedly doesn't know where his next meal is coming from, but he's cute that way. I like 'em plump.) This Raskolnikov may be a starving and neglected intellectual, alienated from society, but at least he enjoys himself, ticking off the abusive harridan of a landlady and strutting around like a little ragged Napoleon. There's a nice moment when he puts on his old jacket and one entire sleeve lining falls out. He twirls it around his fingers and sticks it into his pocket like a display handkerchief.
They went to great lengths to make the pawnbroker an unsympathetic character, as I said before. In fact, she's played by an old lady who looks and sounds exactly like my maternal grandmother, an unpleasant woman at the best of times. The resemblance is so strong it's scary. We first see Sonia when she and Raskolnikov wind up at the pawnshop--she to try and get a little money on her family Bible, he to put his graduation-present pocket watch up the spout. In a rather cute and touching wordless scene, they stand around outside the apartment door, glancing at one another awkwardly and avoiding direct eye contact. Then she's cross-questioned and insulted by the troll-like old pawnbroker, while Raskolnikov has to stand there and listen.
Sonia was quite well done. I was initially sure they had just picked her out because they wanted a girl who was shorter than Raskolnikov, but she was pretty good on her own merits: tough and hurt. The actress was laboring under a rather stupid change from the book to the movie. In the book, Sonia is the moral compass for Raskolnikov. He has a last chance to weasel out of confessing at the end, but he can't back out because he knows Sonia is watching and he doesn't want to disappoint her. Well, in the movie they have her collapse under the strain of loving a guy who is likely to spend years in the federal pen, and she abandons all her moral qualms and tells him he should flee the country, never mind atoning for the murder he committed. This means that Raskolnikov gets to be the strong, righteous figure at the end who makes the decision all on his own, without the help of some chick. Of course, I hated the change. Sonia was fine up to there, though. There was a good moment outside her seedy apartment by the canal:
Sonia: Isn't it beautiful... On clear nights you can see all the stars reflected in the water, and I sometimes feel as if I could reach down and dip up a bucket full of stars.
Raskolnikov: You're lonely.
Sonia: So are you.
Strangely enough, Peter Lorre and Marian Marsh didn't have much chemistry together. Okay, Raskolnikov doesn't have a sex life in the book, either, but you'd think they would throw a few clinches into the movie. No such luck. He does wind up bawling on her knees, of course, but it's just not the same.
This cast picture turned up while I was trying and failing to find a photo of the pawnbroker, and it's oddly cute. From left to right: Sonia, Razmunihin, Raskolnikov (his body language is a clue towards the subtlety level of this movie), Svidgrailov, Porfiry ("Peter" in the movie) Petrovitch, and Raskolnikov's mom and sister. The last two did an excellent job in thankless roles; Dunya gets a lot less stage time than in the book, but what she does get is all good. One of the most enjoyable small touches is the relationship between Raskolnikov and his sister. Her name has been Westernized to "Antonia", and he calls her "Toni". They tease each other, they love one another, and she's obviously never stopped seeing him as her bratty but adorable little brother. She's about half a head taller than he is, but that just points up their relative maturity levels. By the way, I'm very fond of sibling characters in fiction generally. Being an only child, I like the trope of someone your own age who has had virtually the same experiences as yourself but is interestingly different.
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The guy who played Petrovitch was the real surprise for me. Of course PL did a smashing job, but by now I'm starting to take it for granted he'll be the most interesting thing about any given movie. What is rarer is a co-player who can stand up to him. Lorre's so very fun to watch that unless the other actors have a lot of presence, they kind of disappear next to him. He is the garlic goat cheese salad of the acting profession--whatever you put near him in the fridge will start to taste like him, unless it has a robust flavor of its own. (I must be hungry.) Edward Arnold stands up to him with ease. (The two of them even got this cool poster art.) He was pretty much Petrovitch as presented in the book--extremely genial, fat and getting on in years and fond of a drink, presenting himself as terribly honest, kindhearted, and a little dense, then stalking in on his quarry like an experienced old killer.
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You know who the two of them reminded me of? Ko-Ko versus the Mikado.
Raskolnikov: *bluster*cringe*evade* I wasn't there! And even if I was there, I wouldn't be such a duffer as to miss all the money hidden in the mattress!
Petrovitch: Come, come, my friend, I don't suspect you one bit! Except for the part where I do. But you'll probably get time off of Siberia if you make a direct confession. Suppose we jail you after lunch.
Raskolnikov: I don't want any lunch.