Introducing George Hamilton

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded interesting was Crime and Punishment, USA. I finally got around to watching it, and now you get the review.

When you seem the title, you might think of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel Crime and Punishment. You'd be right, as the opening credits state it's based on the novel. Those opening credits also give a credit "Introducing George Hamilton", getting a screen all to himself. Hamilton plays Robert Cole, the renamed version of the Raskolnikov character from the book. Also, the action is moved from Saint Petersburg to then-contemporary (the movie was released in 1959) Los Angeles and makes the Raskolnikov character a sort of beatnik.

If you don't know the story of Crime and Punishment, at least it's one that's easy to put into a one- or two-sentence synopsis. Raskolnikov/Cole (to be referred to as Cole for the rest of the post since that's the character name in the movie) kills an elderly pawnbroker woman in part because he believes in a philosophy that says killing can be morally acceptable when it's for some higher moral good. (Somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock's Rope in that manner.) But Cole has a conscience, and the police are able to use that against him to get him to confess.

Indeed, we see foreshadowing of that conscience at the very beginning of the movie. The police are coming to arrest the pawnbroker's killer, except that they've got the wrong man. This draws a crowd of people, of whom Cole is one. But Cole collapses at the sight of the wrong man being taken away, and is brought back to his beach-adjacent apartment by his friend Rafe.

Cole had pawned some of his stuff with the murder victim, and is dumb enough to go straight away to the police to ask for them back, when Lt. Porter (Frank Silvera) tells him they would have given im the evidence when it was no longer evidence. Porter is a dogged investigator, and figures out pretty quickly that Cole killed the woman, but how to get Cole to confess?

Another subplot involves Cole's sister Debbie. She's recently gotten engaged to a much older lawyer, mostly so she can have a comfortable life, but this really ticks off Robert. And then Debbie's former employer Fred Swanson, now a widower, comes looking for Debbie because the man's late wife bequathed a nice sum to Debbie. However, Fred also propositioned Debbie which is why she left and is also something that ticks off Robert. Fred is another one who talks a lot to Robert about the subject of murder, something Robert can never seem to get away from....

I, having majored in Russian back in college, read the book Crime and Punishment ages ago and never really revisited it before seeing this movie version. The book is quite talky because of how it deals with philosophy and the idea of moral superiority. It's something that's difficult to translate to the screen, especially Hollywood of the 1950s. The idea to set it amongst a beatnik-adjacent community is a daring one, although one that doesn't always work. (Hitchcock, of course, got around the idea of philosophizing by having the gimmick of one location and extremely long takes.)

George Hamilton is not normally thought of as a "serious" actor, but to be honest, he doesn't do badly with the material. The supporting cast, however, is nothing special or memorable. Ultimately, Crime and Punishment, USA winds up as an intriguing experiment that doesn't quite succeed but is definitely worth a watch for what the moviemakers tried to do.