by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened
Charles our “feature” for the evening, a quite fascinating film from Josef von
Sternberg at Columbia in 1935 based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic novel Crime
and Punishment. Sternberg had just been
fired from Paramount, where he’d become a star director with the 1927 film Underworld which set the template for the gangster movies of
the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. In 1930 he’d arranged with the German UFA
studio to make a film there for Emil Jannings, who’d just been let go by
Paramount because they didn’t think his English would be good enough for sound
films, and the film was The Blue Angel, a tale of a middle-aged college professor and the young cabaret
entertainer who seduces and ruins him. To play the young cabaret entertainer
Sternberg tested almost every actress in Berlin with a voice and a figure,
including a woman named Marlene Dietrich who’d been passed over two years
previously by G. W. Pabst for the role of Lulu in Pandora’s Box in favor of American actress Louise Brooks. Having
already lost one big role, Dietrich showed up for her audition with Sternberg
with a bored, world-weary attitude because she was convinced she’d never get
the part and was just going through the motions — and Sternberg immediately
decided to use her because that bored, world-weary attitude was just what he
wanted for the character. Sternberg took Dietrich back with him when he
returned to the U.S. and Paramount, and starred her in a series of six films
that started out as both artistic successes and commercial hits: Morocco,
Dishonored, Shanghai Express and Blonde
Venus. Then the box-office receipts began
to fall and Paramount’s head of production, Emmanuel Cohen, decided to have
Dietrich work with Rouben Mamoulian on a film called Song of Songs, which flopped. Dietrich and Sternberg resumed their
collaboration in 1934 with two great films, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil Is a Woman, which were huge box-office failures. Paramount
blamed Sternberg for Dietrich’s box-office decline and fired him, whereupon he
was picked up on a sort of corporate rebound by Harry Cohn, head of Columbia
Pictures, one of whose joys was having successes with major talents who had
bombed elsewhere.
The mastermind of the deal to have Sternberg work at Columbia
was B. P. Schulberg, the Paramount studio head who had signed both Sternberg
and Dietrich and run the company until Emmanuel Cohen forced him out.
(Schulberg’s son Budd never forgave Cohen and used him as the model for the
nasty, avaricious, unscrupulous Sammy Glick in his classic Hollywood novel What
Makes Sammy Run?) Schulberg decided to put
Sternberg in charge of a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and
Punishment at a time in Hollywood history
in which, as Richard Griffith noted in his contribution to the film history
book The Film Till Now, studios
were sneaking in social comment by dressing it up in period drag and adapting
classic novels that involved the class conflicts of previous eras. It was a
time when Hollywood was big on Charles Dickens — in the 1930’s the U.S. studios
made films of Great Expectations, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two
Cities and A Christmas Carol — and Schulberg seems to have been drawn to
Dostoyevsky as a sort of Russian Dickens, one whose works could likewise be
tapped to dramatize antagonisms between rich and poor and offer at least some
hint of a social critique. The agenda is even stated on screen in a title card
at the opening which reads, “The time of our story is any time, the place any
place where human hearts respond to love and hate, pity and terror.” Sternberg
later claimed in his bitter autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, that he hadn’t wanted to make this movie and had
been forced into it by a contractual obligation, but (as with his later film The
Shanghai Gesture, which he said he did just
as a favor to an old friend who was producing it) it comes off as a genuinely
personal movie. Screenwriters Joseph Anthony and S. K. Lauren had the
unenviable task of adapting a substantial novel (though Crime and
Punishment is relatively short compared to
Dostoyevsky’s other works) into the script for a 90-minute film, but they did a
good job not only conveying the essence of the story but tapping into
Dostoyevsky’s beliefs on religion, morality and class.
Sternberg also got a
good cast together, including Peter Lorre in his second U.S. film as
Raskolnikov (rather jarringly his first name in the movie is “Roderick”!), the
star college student turned impoverished writer who kills an avaricious
pawnbroker (Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the veteran stage star who nearly three
decades earlier had created the part of Eliza Doolittle in the world premiere
of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion,
and who complained that she had wanted to suggest the character’s ugliness with
facial expressions alone, and instead Sternberg and cinematographer Lucien
Ballard used every camera trick in the book to make her look awful and
essentially do her acting for her). Top billing went to Edward Arnold, who
plays Inspector Porfiry, the police official who finally figures out that Raskolnikov
committed the murder after nearly condemning the usual obvious suspect — even
though he doesn’t appear until half an hour into this 88-minute movie — and his
whole approach to the investigation makes him seem like the ancestor of
Columbo, the detective who solves a crime essentially by annoying the suspect
into confessing. Crime and Punishment is a rich, deeply rewarding film, and blessedly Sternberg, Anthony and
Lauren resisted the temptation to “lighten it up” and insert the usual unfunny
“comic relief” characters. (The same year, Edward Arnold also played a police
detective in James Whale’s marvelous comedy-thriller Remember Last
Night?, an otherwise great movie in which
Whale and his writers saddled
Arnold with a comic-relief sidekick and Whale let him get away with a big
beaver job on the scenery — which makes it all the more impressive that
Sternberg actually got the usually overbearing Arnold to underact.) The film is a major accomplishment, with three
star performers gripping the screen — Arnold, Lorre (billed as “The Celebrated
European Actor, Peter Lorre”) and Marian Marsh (who’d played Trilby to John
Barrymore’s Svengali four years before), who plays Sonia, Raskolnikov’s
prostitute (at least it’s hinted in a film made when Production Code enforcement
was at its most draconian) friend. Sternberg’s direction of her proves that he
hadn’t lost his command of women when Hollywood politics split him and Dietrich
up professionally; her performance is equal to those of her more legendary male
colleagues and offers the same kind of world-weariness Sternberg got out of
Dietrich in The Blue Angel.
The
film also offers some other acid-etched performances, notably those of
Raskolnikov’s family — Elizabeth Risdon as his mother and Tala Birell as his
sister Antonya — and one of its best aspects is the absolutely vicious
characterization of Lushin (Gene Lockhart), a well-connected upper-class twit
who boasts that he’s landed two government jobs (which causes Raskolnikov to
ridicule him in a series of ever-nastier insults in which the two jobs become
seven and then 10) and who basically shows up in the lives of Raskolnikov’s
family by essentially offering to buy Antonya, insisting that he’ll share his
riches with them in exchange for her total obedience, telling Raskolnikov, “I
prefer a girl, like your sister, who’s experienced poverty. I believe that a
wife should always look up to her husband as a benefactor.” The 1935 Crime
and Punishment is a fascinating movie,
proof that all those years glamorizing Marlene Dietrich hadn’t taken away
Sternberg’s ability to do a socially conscious movie and making me more curious
than ever to see Sternberg’s 1930 film of Theodore Dreiser’s An
American Tragedy (a movie Sternberg got put
on after Paramount’s original choice, Russian master Sergei Eisenstein, got
himself fired for ramping up the novel’s social comment when Paramount wanted
it toned down), which I suspect is a lot better than George Stevens’ terrible 1951 remake, A Place in
the Sun. When the Metropolitan Opera did a
production of a recent operatic adaptation of An American Tragedy their magazine, Opera News, published an article about previous adaptations of
the story that included stills of the lake scenes from both the Sternberg and
Stevens film — and the Sternberg was awesomely beautiful, full of dappled
reflections of light on the lake surface and a visual look that conveyed an air
of doomed romanticism, while the Stevens version of the same scene was
photographed as flatly as a picture postcard. Crime and Punishment came from my backlog of home-recorded DVD’s and was
a movie I hadn’t seen until now, but it was well worth the wait, a finely honed
production that may not have done justice to the letter of Dostoyevsky’s novel
but certainly communicated its spirit.
