The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 30-April 5
Directed by Josef von Sternberg
Doing his best Napoleon impression, Peter Lorre stars as Roderick Raskolnikov: a crazed, sweaty, indigent recent university graduate with some interesting ideas about crime, who attempts to merge theory and praxis by murdering an old woman. In Dostoyevsky’s novel, Raskolnikov’s crime, and subsequent torment, are inseparable from—perhaps symptomatic of—the mire of imperial St. Petersburg. But Sternberg, unenthused about the project he was obligated by his Columbia contract to direct, replaces all of Petersburg with one double-headed eagle statuette on a police inspector’s desk, and loses Raskolnikov’s dreams and deliriums altogether. Tighter than the messy novel, the resulting film is a procedural in which a large, ominously jolly policeman hounds a tiny egomaniac: a useful lesson in concision. Elina Mishuris (new 35mm restoration April 3, 1pm at the Metrograph)