Crime and Punishment USA
6 /10 1 Votes
Director Denis Sanders Country United States | 5.8/10 IMDb Duration Language English | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Release date November 1, 1959 (1959-11-01) Based on Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (novel), Walter Newman Tagline Look Deep Into the Eyes of America's Violent Generation! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Crime and Punishment U.S.A. (1959) is an American feature film, directed by Denis Sanders, and is— as the New York Times put it, “a beat generation version”—of the novel Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Contents
The film was released on November 1, 1959, is 96 minutes in length, and shot in black-and-white. In addition to making some changes in the plot and characterizations, it sets the tale, not in 19th-century Russia, but in mid-20th-century Los Angeles. The script was written by Walter Newman, and stars George Hamilton, in his first screen role, as “Robert Cole,” the character based on Raskolnikov, the protagonist of the Russian novel.
Cast
Production
According to Hamilton, director Denis Sanders "saw his project as a tragedy for the Beat Generation" and cast Hamilton because of his similarity to Tony Perkins.
The film was completed early in 1958 but took over a year to be released.
Reception
In his review in The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann commented that “modern versions of classics are generally more clever than convincing because the very term ‘classic’ means a timeless work . . . that need not be transplanted.” Nonetheless, he continued, “by reason of its attendant skills and an innocent, unpretentious earnestness of address," Crime and Punishment U.S.A. "is a moderately interesting attempt to state the material of a vast symphony with a small jazz combination.”
Roger Corman later said the film "lost me a lot of money."
References
Crime and Punishment U.S.A. WikipediaCrime and Punishment U.S.A. IMDb Crime and Punishment USA themoviedb.org