William Shatner, monk

It's easy to forget that William Shatner was a classically trained actor before becoming Captain Kirk on Star Trek more or less turned his acting career into a bit of a parody, albeit a very successful one. So, a role that looking back seems terribly out of place is one of his earliest film roles, in the 1958 adaptation of the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov.

As you can guess from the title, there are multiple brothers, and that the action is set in Tsarist Russia. Yul Brynner is the star, playing Dmitri Karamazov, an officer in the army who is constantly getting himself into debt because of his high-living ways. Ivan (Richard Basehart) is a writer and a radical, while Alexei (that's William Shatner) is a young monk and in many ways the conscience of the family. Their mother -- well mothers, since they're the product of two marriages in the original book -- has died, but Dad Fyodor (Lee J. Cobb) is still alive, and a towering presence over the rest of the family.

Dad has a reasonable sum of money that could be a nice nest egg inheritance for three sons, and there may be a fourth son as well. Epileptic Smerdyakov (Albert Salmi) is rumored to be Fyodor's son, fathered out of wedlock, and now he's working as a servant to Fyodor and whom Fyodor treats very badly. Although, to be fair, Fyodor treats everybody badly, with the possible exception of his mistress Grushenka (Maria Schell). Dmitri, constantly being in debt, would like to be able to get that inheritance now, although in 1870s Russia I don't think they had those dishonest companies that would buy annuities for pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, Dmitri has a mistress of his own in Katya (Claire Bloom) but starts to get interested in Grushenka, although that may only be for her money.

There are threats to kill Fyodor, and as you can surmise, Fyodor does ultimately wind up murdered. Alexei the monk clearly wouldn't do such a thing, while Ivan has the airtight alibi of having been in Moscow. Dmitri is the obvious candidate and gets put on trial for it, but we learn that Smerdyakov is smarter than he seems and has been plotting to have a confrontation between Dmitri and Fyodor. With that in mind, Dmitri proclaims his innocence at trial, and has Alexei as a character reference, even though there's a ton of circumstantial evidence that makes Dmitri appear guilty.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's original novel runs to something like 800 pages, depending of course on the size of the page. Suffice it to say that it's a pretty darn long novel. It's also as much a character and philosophical study as it is a narrative novel. Both of these things mean that it's the sort of book that can be tough to adapt to a more visual and narrative-driven medium like film. (Tolstoy is even more difficult in that regard.) Here, the 800 pages are distilled down to a bit shy of two and a half hours, but even this feels long because the characterizations don't allow for quick action.

As for the acting, Yul Brynner and Lee J. Cobb both get the opportunity to give outsized performances. Brynner, despite having been born in Vladivostok and being authentically Russian, feels like a caricature of Tsarist officer stereotypes. Cobb, as always, chews the scenery wildly. William Shatner is a decided supporting role, and he does the best he can with the material. If he hadn't gone on to Captain Kirk, I think his performance would be better regarded.

The Brothers Karamazov definitely has flaws because of the difficulties in translating the source material to the screen. But it's still interesting to see how the studio tried to pull it off.