In this decelerating interval two films were made in the cart-before-the-horse system…. A novel by Dostoevski is to be transferred to the screen. This, to begin with, is a redoubtable assignment. At best it can be no more than a film about a detective and a criminal, no more related to the true text of the novel than the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower is related to the Russian environment. As mixed a collection of human beings as can be imagined is before me, members of a cast of players herded together by a Hollywood studio. Some are literate, some are not. Among those present are trained performers and those who have made the jump to the screen from the trampoline of a mattress. A few have been chosen for their skill in characterization; still others are there because they are under contract to the studio…. [None] have read the novel to be filmed, with the sole exception of Peter Lorre, who, though unsuitable for the part of Raskolnikov, has been contracted for it…. All values in a film must be predetermined, and when a director is called upon to direct a story and players over which he has had no choice, his contribution can be only a routine one.
Von Sternberg introduced Crime and Punishment with a prologue, or, as some felt, a disclaimer:
The time of our story is any time,
the place anyplace where human hearts respond
to love and hate, pity and terror.
The film opens on a college commencement. Two lines of students stand at attention, hands clenched behind their backs. One alone upsets the symmetry of the design. In shadowy silhouette stands Roderick Raskolnikov (the “celebrated European film star” Peter Lorre)—head bowed deferentially, arms at his side, his white hands piercing the somber lighting. Crude sets molder into gray translucent backgrounds, a touch of German gothic. The players sport no greatcoats, no pointed beards. This is not nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, but 1930s anywhere.
Film historians later asked themselves whether von Sternberg had answered an impersonal assignment with indifference or had merely attempted to live down his reputation as a mad genius and put his best professional foot forward. Had his genius gone dry, his personal vision blurred? His co-workers, and especially Lorre, didn’t think so. Columbia had given von Sternberg free rein with the filming. No one interrupted him on the set. The subject interested him, he was reportedly delighted with the script, and he evinced profound respect for the abilities of Lorre and Edward Arnold, who played Inspector Porfiry. One interviewer watched him enthusiastically bob about the set acting as head gaffer and sitting on the camera dolly and watching every move as it was seen by the lens—while the cameraman stood beside him. Robert Allen, who played Raskolnikov’s friend Dmitri, even recalled seeing von Sternberg touching up a crack in a stone wall with his paint brush. Contrary to his image as an insufferable megalomaniac, he impressed Allen as a gentle, low-key director who quietly monitored every detail of the filming: “We were called in several days before they started to shoot the picture, and we all sat around a big table and we read through the script for two days. And if you threw in an extra ‘but’ or an ‘and,’ or a handle to get you into the dialogue, von Sternberg went, ‘No, that is not in the script. We’re sticking to it. We’re not changing a word.’”
Filming began in fall of 1935. Von Sternberg stayed ahead of schedule, despite taking time to get it right. “Oh, yes, he rehearsed more and he shot more film,” said Marian Marsh, who played Sonya. “We’d do the same thing over and over again. It was nothing to do it twenty times…. He changed the lights and the lighting. He changed all kinds of things, had you come in a different way and by a different entrance. He tried many, many things.”
Von Sternberg found his biggest supporter in Lorre, who praised the director for his fluid and straightforward storytelling, free of heavy Russian despair: “For the first time in a long while he had a script to work with, a story good enough and important enough to interest him, to keep his attention focused upon the core of the screen instead of letting it get preoccupied with the composition and decoration of its outer edges.” Lorre added that “he takes more pains with players than any man I have ever worked with, and he takes the camera over completely. If the picture is a success, he will deserve ninetenths of the credit.”
Nine years later, Lorre picked up where he had left off in a column titled, “The Role I Liked Best …” for the Saturday Evening Post: “It was a stark, honest part and, happily, most of its honesty was preserved in the film. Not a single extra was used in the picture because director Josef von Sternberg wanted to eliminate everything that might possibly distract the audience from the story itself. For the same reason, no exotic settings or costumes were used. Unfortunately, this very interesting film technique was so smoothly successful that it was practically unnoticed.”
Lorre felt lucky to be playing Raskolnikov. He knew he fell far short of the physical requirements of the role. After all, Dostoyevsky had described his protagonist as “exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair.” Marsh, who met the actor in von Sternberg’s office on the Columbia lot, took exception to Lorre’s image of himself:
He was attractive. His eyes were so expressive. And he was so well-mannered. He had that European politeness, in which he greeted you with a little bit of a bow and looked you right in the eye. It was not just a casual, “Oh, hello, glad to meet you” sort of thing. It was a little ceremony…. And he turned to von Sternberg and said, “I really have told you before I don’t think I’m handsome enough for the part. Why should she love me that much?” I was amused by that and said, “I find you most attractive, Mr. Lorre.” And so we were good friends right away.
On the face of it, Lorre and von Sternberg were also good friends. “Everybody warned me about him before we started the picture,” the actor told an interviewer shortly after completing production, “but I found him helpful and sincere.” Soon after arriving in Hollywood, the actor had suffered another internal hemorrhage and had been put on Dilaudid. Tests performed by Dr. Joel Pressman revealed that he was not suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, earlier thought to explain his coughing blood, but from bronchiectasis, a disorder of the large bronchi, often caused by a severe respiratory infection in childhood. Working back to back in Mad Love, Crime and Punishment, and Secret Agent, Lorre explained, had put him under great strain. He fatigued easily. In order to keep going, he resorted to drugs.20 Von Sternberg answered Lorre’s need for rest with either close-up work or an invitation for the actor to retire to his dressing room.
Behind the scenes, however, the actor walked on eggshells. In his autobiography, Lorenzo Goes to Hollywood, Edward Arnold recalled arriving on set after working on retakes at another studio; he now began to grow drowsy. “Joe looked like a thunder-cloud all through the scene,” recalled Arnold. Afterward, he asked a script girl what was wrong. “‘You yawned in his face,’” she replied. “I laughed, and said, ‘Oh, tell him to go to—.’ So I was on the warpath once more. Peter Lorre, who was playing the criminal I was tracking down, met me a few minutes afterwards, and inquired rather naively, it seemed to me, ‘Did you tell von Sternberg you were sorry?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘why should I? It was nothing personal. I am dead tired. I worked all last night at the Universal Studio.’ ‘Well, if you don’t do something about it,’ insisted Lorre, ‘he’ll take it out on the rest of us.’”
Described by Arnold as a “RAPER OF EGOS … [who] crushes the individuality of those he directs in pictures,” von Sternberg contended that “an actor is chosen for his fitness to externalize an idea of mine, not an idea of his.” Marsh remembered that
Peter tried to do it the way von Sternberg wanted it done, but somehow his own way would creep into it. Von Sternberg wanted you to do it his way, but he wanted it to be you at the same time. He didn’t want you to be just a puppet. He wanted your own feelings…. When Peter would do a scene and do it so well, he never thought it was good enough. He really wanted to be exactly right, to do it von Sternberg’s way. But I know that von S
ternberg liked what he did. He’d say, “Don’t worry, it’s different.”
For twenty-eight days of filming—a record time for von Sternberg—Lorre lived the role, on-set only, as he was quick to point out. “You see,” he told a reporter, “to be an actor is to understand quite thoroughly what the individual you portray is like—how he thinks, what his daily habits are, and why he does the things he does.” Looking back, he noted, “When I am studying a part and working out its shades and nuances, I become so absorbed that I’m in a fever pitch.” This was true behind the camera as well, according to Celia, who told a reporter that when Peter is working, “he is overwrought. He doesn’t sleep well. He dreams constantly of his role. He is not like himself, but seems moody and has little conversation with me or any one else. These roles seem to take a great deal out of him. We make no social engagements whatever while he is working.” A visitor to the set confirmed that the actor appeared tense and nervous.21Co-workers likewise found him introverted and very quiet. According to Catharine Lorre, her father “more readily identified with strongly emotional characters. He would reach a boiling point, which was as close as possible to an actual physical breakdown.” Marsh recalled that “Peter was really very into it, really being that person, the illusion of the character. We’d get into a scene and read through and get the words right before walking through it. Then something would come over both of us. A few times I remember him looking at me and saying, ‘Do you feel it? Do you feel something?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, I feel it.’ We just had an understanding. It was comfortable…. I don’t think Peter ever really planned what he was going to do until he got into it, but there was a lot of thinking in back of it.”
Lorre drew greater attention for his effort than for his achievement: “Lorre plays … with dazzling force and finish”; “Lorre bares the soul of the tormented homicide with brilliant flashes of histrionics”; “Lorre keeps it on a high level”; “Mr. Lorre provides a performance … [that] can be placed among Hollywood’s greatest thespic efforts.” Audiences and reviewers alike, who took their literature with a little levity, also applauded the actor’s sardonic sense of humor, if anything so heavy-handed as pounding Lushin’s hat flat with his fist falls under that heading. “It was a cheap little piece of comic relief,” wrote Graham Greene, “but Lorre got from it every possible laugh.”
Nonetheless, the weight of critical opinion fell heavily against him. Critics faulted his portrayal as hectic, hysterical, disconnected, unmotivated, roughhewn, erratic, and unconvincing. “He has no more psychological continuity than a marionette dancing on a stick,” wrote Andre Sennwald. “His behavior is a series of unrelated and meaningless moods which tell us nothing of what is going on inside of him. The drama, in brief, has been completely externalized so as to make a pattern for a detective story.”
Joseph Alsop Jr., writing in the New York Herald-Tribune, noted “frequent gleams of the old Lorre in his performance” and pointed out that “occasionally he takes the bit between his teeth and starts to gallop along in his old form.” However, he concluded that “Mr. Lorre has offered his customers the same old stuff, and plenty of it. His performance is an unearthly blend of ‘M,’ and his work in ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ … Mr. Lorre’s trouble may be that Hollywood has just a trace of the Upas tree about it. The place has a savage habit of killing actors, and then making them into profitable zombies.”
Others accused him of making Raskolnikov just another blood-stained psychopath. Edwin Blum, a scenario editor for producer Lester Cowan, “thought Lorre was miscast as Raskolnikov—and in fact threw the whole picture out of whack. The reason? Raskolnikov was a classic intellectual murderer and not in the least psychotic—whereas Lorre was the very archetype of the psychotic murderer…. So in this sense, Dostoievksi, who was studying the Nietzschean rationality in Raskolnikov, was betrayed not only by von Sternberg (who was too dense to grasp anything), but by Peter Lorre, who in his nature and performance set forth the responsive psychotic state to the Hitlerian aggressive psychotic state. One could, in fact, conceive of Lorre—as a rather demented lesser underling, a clerk, perhaps—turning and stabbing Hitler in the heart as he passed by—and saying he didn’t do anything.”
Even his old friend Franz Theodor Csokor, who found Lorre a quiet, sad man of “Dostoievskian dimension,” hoped that “nobody stamps him to a type that doesn’t reach above a mask.”
An article titled “Lorre in New Horror Role” stung the actor. Clearly on the defensive, he told the press that Crime and Punishment “is by no means a ‘horror’ film, but great tragedy.” Raskolnikov is “a comparatively normal person,” he emphasized. “He does not kill because of an inner compunction [sic], like ‘M,’ but from force of circumstance. What happened to him might happen to anyone. He is a subject for psychologists, but not for pathologists.”
Lorre had struggled to squeeze some meaning between his lines, seesawing between the possibilities of intuition and intellect. He enacted the cool, arrogant Raskolnikov at a Brechtian distance with simple direct gestures and studied and stylized yells, scowls, and poses. At the same time, he submerged himself in the sensitive and suffering student. In a scene charged with psychological agonizing, Raskolnikov retreats to his shabby apartment, slams the door, and throws a temperamental fit. Anger and confusion struggle for the upper hand. “MONEY! MONEY! MONEY!” he screams as he sweeps the books from his table and then collapses. Lorre also delved inside himself for the final scene, finding, as one reviewer wrote, a “childlike martyr, radiant in redemption.” But Lorre was spinning his wheels. No transitions bridge the duality of Raskolnikov’s personality, prompting one contemporary reviewer to complain that the actor was “baleful and spineless by turns.” Spanning the psychologicalrifts in the story was impossible. Blocked by the script, Lorre’s performance is lost and labored, searching for a center where there is none. Little wonder that on the bill with Crime and Punishment was the Columbia comedy short subject, Oh My Nerves.
Unwilling to swim upstream against the edifying current of classic literature, most reviewers shuffled about for some suitable—and superficial—stock phrases to voice their approval of the new trend toward fiction into film: “Classic Crime Film,” “Absorbing Mental Study,” “Powerful Drama,” “Enthralling Picture of Dostoievsky Classic.” The few who had read the book understood just how far Crime and Punishment fell short of the original work. Stripped of substance—Raskolnikov’s careful preparation of the crime, his subsequent feelings of loneliness and estrangement, his “extraordinary man” theories, the recurring motif of confession—it became “just a good detective story,” as von Sternberg himself had predicted during filming.
In response to a letter accusing film producers of “butchering” famous novels, Britain’s Film Weekly, in the interest of a frank and open discussion of the question, invited contributions from screenwriters. Joseph Anthony and S.K. Lauren, who coscripted the film, answered “the increasingly common complaint” in an essay titled “Novel into Film.” In their own defense, they stated their good intentions of rendering “as accurately and as consistently as possible the creations of Dostoievsky’s mind,” yet admitted that “small deviations from the book” may be brought up against them. Getting the psychology of the character absolutely right, retaining the dramatic value of the soliloquies, and scrupulously selecting dialogue from the novel, argued the screenwriters, weighed heavily in their favor. After all, reducing some two hundred thousand words to ninety minutes of film was a daunting task. The greatest difficulty, however, lay in adapting the well-known personalities of the principal players to the characters in the book. “As scenario writers,” wrote Lauren and Anthony, “we could not allow ourselves to submerge completely the valuable and well-known personalities of Lorre, Arnold and Marsh.” Recycling some of the “same old stuff” had been part of the plan to effect a “character compromise.”
Coming some four months after the November 26 release, however, their exposition sounded warmed-over, a
case of too little, too late. The verdict was in and it was not good. “Peter Lorre is beaten before he begins,” wrote Andre Sennwald in the New York Times, “and can offer nothing, except in individual scenes…. Having a vast regard for Mr. Lorre’s talents, I refuse to charge him with failure to create a full-length portrait of a character who is psychologically meaningless in the very writing of the American script.” Another reviewer praised von Sternberg for allowing Lorre to tell the story through facial expressions instead of dialogue. Nonetheless, by reducing the psychological drama to visuals, he left the actor holding an empty bag.
Moderating the extremes of critical opinion, Sennwald granted that “within the limits permitted him by an indecisive script, Mr. Lorre gives a fascinating performance, revealing once again his faculty for blending repulsion and sympathy in the figure he projects to his audience.” In his scrapbook, the actor kept a German review that set his performance apart from the film: “Now Lorre has reached the climax of ability. He has a touching human power, something demonic; one can feel it in his humor and he is equipped with the rare ability to say the unspeakable with the sparest means of expression.”
Crime and Punishment suffered by comparison with Crime et châtiment, a vastly superior French film version of the novel that opened in New York one week ahead of the American production. “The difference between the French and the American screen versions of ‘Crime and Punishment,’” wrote Sennwald, “is the difference between Dostoevsky and a competent wood pulp fictioneer.” Against the dark, grimly realistic Crime et châtiment, Crime and Punishment appeared vulgar and hollowly optimistic. Critics praised the gaunt and hypersensitive Pierre Blanchar’s beautifully fluid and mannered movements. Even Lorre confessed to friends that Crime et châtiment was altogether a better film. Despite the disagreements in film circles, no one denied that the two pictures canceled each other at the box office.
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