I've been entranced with Peter Lorre from the first. Unfortunately, his quirkiness typecast him as a threatening, unstable personage. LIke the character in "M," he never seemed to express joy. Unless he was drunk, he never seemed to smile. In this film, an updated version of the great Dostoevsky work, he plays the brilliant student murderer Raskolnikov, who has done in a harsh old pawnbroker. She is evil, but her worth in the eyes of God is as his. His family is being manipulated by a cad because they have no money, and so in order to appease this man, he kills the old woman. They portray him as an expert in criminology which sets him against a police detective, bent on proving his guilt. The punishment isn't a jail sentence but rather the intense guilt he experiences. This guilt manifests itself from the second he brings down a fireplace poker on the head of woman. This is well done, even though it can't match for a second the incredible book upon which it is based. Lorre and Edward Arnold parry and thrust mentally and this makes the film worth seeing, even though it is diminished by a soft Hollywood ending and some religious mumbo jumbo.
Review of Crime and Punishment
