Crime and Punishment USA (1959)

How sad is this?

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

****SPOILERS*** Updated version of Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky's crime classic has "Hansome George" Hamilton in his film debut as the creepy and psychopathic law school drop out Robert Cole who's guilty conscience gets finally the better of him. That after he thought he committed the perfect crime the robbery and murder of pawn store owner Lizzy Griggs, Eve McVeagh, to get himself enough cash to pay for his collage education. While on the beach burying the incriminating evidence, a blood stain crowbar, Robert does a good deed for once in his life rescuing Mr. Morman who collapsed from a severe case of the booze induced DT's. It's later that Robert got to meet Mr. Morman's daughter Sally, Mary Murphy, whom he in his own crazy and sick way fell in love with.Despite how perfect his crime was it was the on the ball Let. Porter, Frank Silvera, who saw right through Robert knowing indistinctly what a psycho he really was. But with the late Mrs. Griggs' house painter Hendricks, Ken Darko, confessing to her murder there's nothing that he could do about it. It's a smug and confident in his immunity to the law, because as he says he's a member of elite class, Robert who himself confesses to Mr. Griggs murder to Sally , with an evil smirk on his puss or face that's creepy enough to make one's blood run cold, she's still in love with him and feels that she can somehow straighten him out before he kills again!It's when Robert meets his bible thumping older sister Debbie's, Marian Seldes, rejected lover Fred Swanson, John Harding, gets into the picture that Robert, in hating the very sight of him, blows his cool. At first wanting to ring Swanson's neck Robert soon realizes that he and Swanson are one of a kind: Unrepentant murderers. With Swanson having murdered his wife after she caught him in a compromising position with Robert's sister Dobbie!****SPOILERS*** Finally convinced to see things his way Robert takes Swanson's advice to leave town with his now stand by her man girlfriend Sally and start a new life outside of Santa Monica Calif. That's all shot to pieces when Swanson who after making a complete fool of himself! That's by him first threatening to turn her baby bother Robert over to the police for Mrs. Griggs' murder and then like a baby getting down on his hands and knees crying begging and slobbering for her to marry him which she rightfully turned down. Seeing that his life can't go on without her Swanson realizing what a sorry a** spectacle he made of himself does himself in by blowing his brains out! It just happened that the hotel room where Swanson was staying was next to the room where Robert & Sally were who were the first to come on the scene! A completely freaked out Robert finally seeing the light and smelling the coffee drops his act of being a elite superman that's above the law and finally decides to come clean. A zombie like Robert leaves Sally alone as he in what seems like an hypnotic trace goes to the local police station to give himself up to Let. Porter. Thus not only paying the price for his crime but also getting an innocent man off, the house painter Hendrick, who so foolishly confessed to the crime that Robert committed.

Yet another morality tale on the notion that the terribly flawed Man can run, but he can't hide. George Hamilton is superb as a troubled, arrogant young man who attempts to justify having murdered a female pawnbroker. He's no ordinary killer, though. Bob is highly perceptive about people and calls things as he sees them, cutting through the hypocrisy he was raised on.["I was only making conversation," whines his conventional mother. "Why do you feel you gotta make conversation?" Bob retorts. "Can't we just sit and look and see if we've changed?"] Two men serve as nemesis to Bob as he tries to stave off his conscience. Police Lt. Porter, played by an avuncular yet incisive Frank Silvera, is a psychologically knowing voice of reason."I'm your North Star," he tells Bob. "You can't get along without me anymore." At the other end of the morality spectrum is the smarmy Fred Swanson -- who'd been "chained to a woman I had to close my eyes to kiss" -- and may or may not have killed his significantly older wife. ("In a way I miss her," he muses. "At least I had someone to blame when I felt miserable.") Swanson tries to convince Bob that he can run from the authorities, and, more importantly, his own pangs of guilt. But in the end even he doesn't believe his cock-and-bull story. Rounding out a stellar cast are Marian Seldes in the small but interesting role of Bob's older sister, and the beautiful but plainly named Mary Murphy as love interest Sally, a sad figure who tries to take a tentative step toward happiness.I was sorry to read on Wikipedia that Silvera suffered a fatal accident some years after this movie came out. I don't think I've ever seen a police official portrayed with such insightful compassion in a film.Although Dostoyefsky is listed as one of the writers, this production stands tall in its own right. I think this movie deserves far better than its current 5.9 ranking.Enormous credit goes to Denis Sanders, only 10 years older than Hamilton when he directed this film. I was intrigued to be reminded of another starkly unsentimental movie of the era, "The Naked Kiss," while viewing this. Really impressive work!

A young man murders an old woman for money, then relies on a sense of intellectual superiority to defeat an investigating detective.A heavyweight subject like Dostoevski would be a challenge for the most experienced filmmaker. For the youthful crew here, however, it proves way too much. For one, Hamilton simply doesn't have the gravitas to bring off a convincing intellectual heavyweight, and that punches a hole right through the film's middle. But he's not the only one. Silvera's cagey detective makes those cat and mouse sessions with Robert (Hamilton) borderline parody. I don't know what director Sanders was telling him, but whatever it was, it didn't work. Ditto Harding's hammy wife killer that produces another regrettable result. Unfortunately, acting here means more than usual since there's so much loaded conversation. Only the two women, Murphy and Seldes, come off aptly. On the other hand, the filmmakers certainly don't lack imagination. Adapting a bleak 19th- century Russian novel to the sunny climes of LA amounts to an imaginative undertaking, whatever the outcome. However, modifying a dense 1,000-page novel into a 70-minute screenplay would be a challenge for Dostoevski himself. Unfortunately, the effort here is like trying to pack 10 lbs. of weighty story into a 5 lb. leaky screenplay. All in all, I'm glad the Sanders brothers and Hamilton went on to more appropriate projects.

I haven't seen this movie for more years than I care to remember. It was released accompanied by sensationalistic contemporary tag lines -- "Beatniks! Rebels!" -- partly because George Hamilton is seen playing the bongos once in a while. Yet, it has stuck in my memory. It really was an unusual film. First of all, Dostoyevsky is rather awkwardly superimposed on a story involving residents of modern L.A. The novel doesn't quite fit on the setting. People have serious conversations about God and the afterlife. Okay for a 19th-cntury Rusian novel -- but sunny California? Home of the Fountain of the World Cult? And it always bothered me about the novel that everyone in Petersberg seems to be acquainted with everyone else. It was a bit difficult to swallow that proposition in the novel; it is absolutely impossible for that to have been true in L.A. circa 1960, the most anomic community on the face of the planet. But instead of being an irritation, the lack of fit between the plot and its contemporary setting lends the film an unquiet, almost surreal quality. Something is off kilter and we don't know exactly what. We squirm with bemusement.Two points ought to be made. The movie must have been shot on the cheap. In this case, it inadvertently helps. We are given a tour of the seedier sections of L.A. -- railroad tracks, refuse dumps, shabby housing -- that a better-funded film would probably have avoided. Instead of Echo Park we get a slum. This is commonplace now, but it wasn't at the time. It's too bad nobody in California seems to know what a genuine slum looks like. Here it's all a sun-drenched, palm-fronded, flower-strewn paradise, however desecrated. They should have set it in Newark. And they needn't have used high-key lighting so consistently. It looks like an early television sitcom.Second, the acting is actually quite good. I am even willing to forgive George Hamilton's handsomeness. (He's always been willing to poke fun at himself anyway.) Mary Murphy is not the young naif she played in "The Wild One." She's not exactly a hooker either, as she was in the novel. In 1960 neither audiences nor agents of social control were prepared for that. But she is a serious kind of easy lay, which was still saying a lot. Best of all is Frank Silvera. The smooth admirable way in which he insinuates himself into Robert's life. The cat and mouse repartee. The wondering expression on his face, his amazement that Hamilton has not yet caught on, as he tells him who committed the murder -- "Why YOU did, Robert." I don't know how I would respond to the movie now, lo, these many years later. But, crude as it is, it's not just a shoddy ripoff of a famous psychological drama. It would be a mistake to think so. If all the elements of the film are amateurish, as in a high school play, the people involved seem to be hitting the right notes by accident. This is worth catching, a real curiosity.