Crimen y castigo (1951) User Reviews

One review only

[davidtraversa-1 · 7/10 · 12 January 2015]

It really makes me sad when I see some forgotten movie that no one ever saw. And then you see ONE review... Somebody SAW that movie and after enjoying it wrote a review!! Of course, after reading such review I HAD to watch that movie!! And here I'm writing the SECOND review (who knows, one day we may have several reviews for a movie that isn't bad at all).

But first, in order to understand why so many people stay away from these old films I must transfer these (FEW) lines from a long and fascinating article that appeared today in the Huffpost Create Post --12 January 2015-- and here they are:

"Why the Big New Trend in Tech Might Be...: In a recent study, more than half of adults in the UK said that they would stop eating (77%), talking (60%), working (60%), and sleeping (58 %), to answer their mobile phone. Now Apple, Google, Samsung et al want to strap a watch to your wrist and make it buzz every time you have a missed call, email or text message."

OK, I intersected that information from our PRESENT DAY to contrast what an old film (1951) could seem to the younger generation almost an alien product, and indeed, one has to make a very hard mental accommodation to get INTO that story, those characters and their surroundings.

Everything looks extremely outmoded, from men's suits (it goes without saying women's clothes), cars, street life, night life, the prostitution business, friendship, motherhood, sisterhood, etc.

The funny thing is that in a very few minutes into this film, one forgets those trivialities and it really GRABS ONE and doesn't let go till the bitter end!!

You'll find the morals totally outdated, the immersion of these poor people into religion incredibly present in their lives and the concept of right and wrong as hardly compartmentalized as their religious rules dictated at the time (at least in Mexico).

But again, glide over those nowadays fortunately surpassed prejudices and watch the story (fascinating story, by one of the greatest masters of the universal literature: Fydor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky) very well translated to the screen and artfully acted by the whole cast (another thing to remember: The acting was Mexican, and as it was the case with the Argentinian movies, they were a bit excessive in showing their emotions (until the 60s?)... and specially the Anglo-Saxon may find it a bit disconcerting).

As far as I'm concerned... I LOVED IT, I LOVED IT, I LOOOVED IIIIT!!!

Decent adaptation of a literary masterpiece

[Ofear · 17 September 2005]

I don't know why the rating for this movie is so low.Why did you,other 4 people, rated this so low? I think it does a good work adapting Dosteievsky's best known book (and one of my favorite novels) .You may think the movie simplifies the book, but in spite of that I think it's true to the novel's main theme.I think they made a good effort in recreating the atmospheres the Russian master describes. I really liked the way the movie ends, with Ramón, the Mexican Raskolnikov, simply saying "I killed" as he enters the police station.Finally, if it's true that this film is far from movie masterpieces from that era like "Los olvidados"; I believe it's still outstanding into it's Mexican golden age of movies context.

Translating Dostoevsky

[Cineanalyst · 5/10 · 26 September 2019]

For this adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," from late in the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema and from one of its more-acclaimed directors, I had to settle for an auto-translation to English from the original Spanish, but that was a relatively light burden to endure in this case. That's because I've been viewing a bunch of films, from around the world, based on the novel since reading it, which itself was a matter of Russian being interpreted into English, and many of the pictures pick and choose the same snippets from the book. It's unseemly how unoriginal they are at this. Moreover, this Mexican iteration is one of the more faithful in slavishly rendering those scenes of the story. Sure, there are a few differences: names have been changed (except "Sonya," the most universal of monikors from the book it seems), the crime doesn't involve the usual doubling of murders and is otherwise oddly prolonged--there's even a dissolve in the middle of it. The supposed Latin passion of the acting doesn't register much difference, either. At this point, I didn't need to understand one word throughout that any of the actors said, because I've already read and seen just about every aspect of the story that appears here. All the more reason that fidelity to story particulars is of little interest to me. That's not what is great about Dostoevsky's text, and no film will be through that path, either. What does make this one of some interest, however, is that it provides a look into an oft-neglected part of the cinematic world and transports the familiar story, as well as the spectator, to another place and time. Plus, it does do at least one smart thing with the plot.

The relatively few moments compared to the book that the Raskolinikov type, renamed "Ramón Bernal" here, walks the streets of, in this case, 1950s Mexico City are the most fascinating of the film--not only because they're a relief from the stagy flats, or vecindades, full of chatter that occupy most of the proceedings, but also because it offers the spectator a bit of virtual tourism. Of course, one can experience some of that studying the filmmaking practices of yesteryear, too, but I'm afraid this one, while proficient technically, it's also mostly prosaic. The continuity editing, slight dolly movements, sprinkling of close-ups, and shadowy lighting are all standard. The musical score is overblown in the typical classical cinema spirit--adding to the staginess in creating a conspicuously ersatz production. Some of the compositions look good, though, with objects or characters in the foreground framing those in the background to create depth of field. The best of these is the rather comical shot through an open door where Ramón is holding an axe while standing over the pawnbroker's corpse to form the backdrop of the shot as a man in the forefront obliviously walks past and up the stairs of the apartment building.

The smartest thing about the storytelling here is the employment of voiceover narration, which partially solves a problem in adaptation that has plagued many "Crime and Punishment" pictures. Dostoevsky wrote in the third-person omniscient perspective, or, otherwise put, from God's eye-view of the story--allowing the narrator to read characters' thoughts and float between subplots. Many, if not most, films, including this one, already employ omniscient narration, which only leaves the problem of how to render a character's stream of consciousness. Even most Dostoevsky adaptations tend to rely on the usual actorly conveyance, but some include voiceover narration. Those that do seem to come from the noir tradition, of which this may be the first one. Indeed, "Crime and Punishment" seems a natural fit for noir tendencies, shady environments, moral anxieties and fatalism. This one even begins with a glimpse of a flashforward to the scene of the crime underlying the opening credits, and the plot proper begins and ends with Raskolnikov rambling in his own head.