Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is one of those classics that no one is ever reading right now; rather, it's one of those books that everyone claims to have read, eons ago, while they were still at school. While any educated person who can't come up with “Raskolnikov, in the pawnshop, with the hatchet” is not worth his salt—even the most casual of literati can reduce a novel such as this to pithy pronouncements straight out of Clue—few and far between are the C&P veterans who can recall many of the novel's sub-plots. A handful of those who slogged their way through one translation or another back when the world was a simpler place might recollect Rodion's being plagued by both a “Tell-Tale Heart”-type conscience and a nemesis right out of Les Misérables, but—if they do—it's likely that those are the only additional details that have, for them, survived the intervening decades. Still, one must be grateful nowadays for anyone who can remember even that much. (There are other folk for whom the passage of years has muddled the novelist's name and accomplishments with that of the author of War and Peace, and still others for whom Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are nothing more than two proper nouns that end in “y” and reek of Russianness.)

I raise these flags here, at the outset, because the “Raskolnikov, in the pawnshop, with the hatchet” business comes onscreen fairly early on in Robert Wiene's 1923 film (as it does in the literary unfolding), but soon gets lost in the flurry of relatives, relationships, recriminations, and redoubtable patronymics. (For reasons that are debatable—the addition of sound, perhaps, or the reimagining of screenwriter Joseph Anthony, or maybe the growing personality cult devoted to the uber-quirky Peter Lorre—von Sternberg's talkie version focuses on Rodion's … er … Roderick's classic lack of self-control to the near exclusion of the peripheral perambulations of the secondary cast.