Crime and Punishment

(Josef von Sternberg, USA, 1935)

An Ego Against the Law

Crime and Punishment has long been, sadly, an almost invisible film in Josef von Sternberg’s career. Some major texts surveying his work mention it only in passing as “not a felicitous experience” for the director in his brief two-picture stint at Columbia (such is the verdict of Herman G. Weinberg’s 1967 book); others (by, for instance, the great Claude Ollier) don’t mention it at all. It has, for a long time, been difficult to see, and seemingly not on many curatorial agendas or cinephilic wish-lists.

With the release of new Blu-ray/DVD editions, this situation can now change. If we look at Crime and Punishment with fresh eyes, we can discover another gem in Sternberg’s undoubtedly uneven but (for the most part) extraordinary body of work.

But a fresh look also requires a veritable eyewash, and a reprogramming of the mind’s expectations. Yes, Crime and Punishment lacks what Weinberg called largesse: the baroque sets, the ostentatious ornamentation, the glamorous affectations of his most famous work from The Blue Angel (1930) to The Devil is a Woman (1935). Of course, it lacks Marlene Dietrich, the legendary, iconic star of those earlier films.

And, indeed, Sternberg himself had no good words for it, recalling in his often zany autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry (1966) that, as with his subsequent film for producer B.P. Schulberg – the light comic operetta The King Steps Out (1936) – he had consented to a situation in which he had no control over either the script content or the casting.

“These two films carried my name and little else”, Sternberg declared in retrospect; his contribution (as he appraised it) was merely professional, even administrative. He simply needed to keep practicing his craft after the termination of his heady years at Paramount, “like a runner who must keep his legs moving for a little while after the race is over”.

A film made in these conditions could be, as he remarked with a touch of ambiguity, “no better than the cast of players who came with the assignment”. We shall return to what requires careful assessment in that statement.

And, as for any link between this film of Crime and Punishment and the original 1866 classic novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sternberg was not merely dismissive but overtly derisive of the suggestion. Such immortal art, in his view, could rarely make its way through the standard Hollywood method that theatre critic George Jean Nathan had described (and Sternberg relished the quotation) as “ten million dollars’ worth of intricate and ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney”.

But now try to put all this – including Sternberg’s own waspish words – aside. Plunge into the film without preconceptions. Immerse yourself in the extraordinary portrait-style close-ups of the actors – images as remarkable as any in the director’s career, thanks in part to the talent of cinematographer Lucien Ballard. Go with the flow of the determined, heavy rhythm of scenes – the same, deliberate tempo that Sternberg often employed, especially in The Blue Angel.

Look at the way the film illuminates and fully uses its props (books, signs, a poker), objects behind glass, pieces of furniture. Study the intricate staging of the actors’ movements, and everything that is only suggested about the characters’ interrelationships through their gestures and postures.

Yes, the film can seem plain, even bare in comparison with the splendours of the Dietrich cycle; but Sternberg seizes this minimalism and concentrates its powers.

The sensibility or temperament of Sternberg, as expressed in his work, is something truly unique – and it remains, still today, a stumbling block to some people’s appreciation of the films he signed. For unsympathetic viewers unable to tune correctly into this vibe, his movies are simply overwrought and ridiculous, melodramatic in the worst, most pejorative sense. And (so this argument goes) if that was an intentional strategy on the director’s part, it was purely in order to mock the content and exalt the arabesques of “pure style”, with all its glimmering shades, glides and surfaces.

I reject this superficial reasoning, which has never truly allowed itself to feel the depths of both logic and emotion in Sternberg’s cinematic storytelling – and the extent of his personal investment in the work. In a similar but more sophisticated vein, Susan Sontag in the 1960s famously characterised Sternberg’s reigning aesthetic outlook as “camp”, a deliberately “strained seriousness” – but this registering of the undoubted queerness of Sternberg’s cinema doesn’t provide the whole story, either. On a profound level, Sternberg is no more camp than Max Ophüls or Ernst Lubitsch – and no less involved with the force and meaning of what he staged and shaped on screen.

What’s Sternberg on about? One can find echoes of his very particular temperament only in some of the remotest yet most grandiloquent outposts of experimental, avant-garde cinema: Jack Smith (who was a voracious Sternberg fan) in America, Werner Schroeter in Germany, Julio Bressane in Brazil, Carmelo Bene in Italy.

I imagine it this way: Sternberg felt himself to be working within the greatest traditions of art: the masterpieces of its art, literature, architecture, design, music. His films are full of such broadly classical references – touchstones and allusions appear at every level, from the reverent pastiches of classical music standards on the soundtrack to the weave of stylistic references from diverse periods in the décor.

But this was not some obedient, class-driven genuflection to the enshrined, institutionalised canons of high or fine art; like Andrei Tarkovsky, Sternberg experienced a close connection to these past masters and their traditions. He not only studied them, but also entered into a perpetual dialogue with them.

And yet Sternberg remained a modern artist, a citizen of the 20th century. What that meant for him, within his own outlook, is clear from the films themselves: for him, there was always something absurd about the cyclical scenarios of human passion, with their exaggerated hopes and delusions, their fantasies and vendettas. People learn nothing: they repeat their mistakes and act like marionettes in a bad play.

Sternberg did not place himself above this all-too-human fray, in fact quite the contrary – his ultimate testament, The Saga of Anatahan (1953), candidly confesses his favourite philosophical maxim that “nothing human is foreign to me”, and that only dumb luck protects any of us from the most catastrophically awful fates.

Just as deeply, Sternberg extended his view of the human heart (and its misguided brain) to the entire fabric of society and politics: at some level, he saw all public role-playing – in the name of a party, a gender, a cause, a nation, an ideology – as foolish, utter folly destined to crash and burn. This is what we can read, between and sometimes right on the lines, in Fun in a Chinese Laundry – but his films had said it all, already.

As the Australian critic John Flaus has suggested (in his samizdat-like Film Notes), Sternberg stayed faithful, in his own way, to the century’s creed of existentialism.

Sternberg saw that the besetting conflict of civilised existence is between Self and Role. All of us play roles, whether we believe in them or not. The measure of our liberation is the extent to which our sense of identity comes from ourselves, and not from our roles, and the extent to which our roles are self-made, not other-made.

For Flaus, writing this in the early 1980s, “the film world has not yet reached the point Sternberg was at half a century ago”; we can today add another four decades to his wise estimation.

But, coming directly now to Crime and Punishment, we can also see how complex, tricky and knotted Sternberg’s investigation of these philosophic themes could be. The path from Role to Self is rarely clear or direct! The central ambiguity of this film (co-scripted by S.K. Lauren, who worked on Blonde Venus and the Sternberg-influenced Song of Songs in the ‘30s and Edgar Ulmer’s Ruthless in the ‘40s) is not far below its surface: Roderick Raskolnikov (Lorre) is, in moral terms, a monster – but a monster with whom Sternberg entirely sympathises. He is an outlandish version of the existential or Nietzschean “self-made man”, placing himself above society and its laws, values, standards (another version of this type will be at the centre of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope 13 years later).

How could Sternberg not see himself mirrored in this artist-intellectual figure who is misunderstood and overlooked by all, who raises himself far above the mediocre masses – and who is compelled by deeper, darker, more obsessive and more just passions?

Naturally, as a Hollywood production, this version of Crime and Punishment tries hard to resolve all issues in favour of a normalised, acceptable code: ultimately, Raskolnikov grasps the grotesqueness of even his own posturing – once it is mirrored, repeated back to him.

Nonetheless, the “rightful justice is served” ending – and this is frequently the case in Sternberg’s work when it begins from generic conventions – is not necessarily any more weighted or conclusive that anything glimpsed along the way; like Douglas Sirk, Sternberg was a master of the “unhappy happy ending” or “emergency exit” that cast a doubt, a question mark over itself.

In the case of Crime and Punishment, we are sent back, for instance, to the fascinating perversity of the anti-hero’s behaviour from virtually the first moment we see him – diving after his sister, Antonya (Tala Birell – formerly, ironically enough, Dietrich’s screen double in Germany!), as if she was his lover.

Above all, the film is an astounding showcase for Lorre’s brilliance as a screen actor. Sternberg may have been disconcerted by the varying levels of skill and experience in the ensemble he was contractually handed by Schulberg, but as a director he always had a sure sense of who and what to emphasise (and conversely, what to downplay) within the dynamics of a scene or in the composition of a frame.

Lorre is given centre-stage even more surely here than in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). The actor’s work with voice, rhythm, gesture and bodily posture is incomparable – and the scenes that choreograph him in relation to the goading, encircling figure of Edward Arnold´s Porfiry are a masterclass in the craft and art of mise en scène.

It is ultimately a false, uninteresting question to inquire how much of Dostoevsky’s novel remains intact in this (or indeed any) direct adaptation of his work. In terms of his legacy in cinema, Dostoevsky (particularly for Crime and Punishment) has always served as a more diffuse inspiration to film artists ranging from Robert Bresson (Pickpocket, 1959) in France to Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History, 2013) in the Philippines; he’s part of that bedrock of meaningful culture to which Sternberg, too, felt attached.

Even more intrinsic to the serendipitous shape of Sternberg’s career – remembering that his silent Underworld (1927) is often hailed as a decisive influence on the crime genre worldwide – is the undeniable fact that his Crime and Punishment helps to hone what would become a vital, core element of film noir: in Freudian terms, the anti-hero as a criminal Ego gone mad, in fact driven by the Id, coming face to face with the guilt-tripping Superego, who is usually personified as a cop or investigator. We are already deep into Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) or Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949) territory here …

For the better part of a century, commentators have made a bad habit of splitting Sternberg’s style from his subjects, his manner from his script material. But the fault is in our critical and analytical tools, not in Sternberg’s films. It is certainly true that what we experience in Sternberg’s very particular fusion of content and style is nothing much like a well-tempered classicism in filmmaking – and nor does it really resemble any of the screen modernisms, the New Waves and other revolutionary gestures that sprang up in his wake.

Flaus put the matter well: “Sternberg’s stylisation is a self-defining, consistent code of argument … His universally conceded mastery of lighting, composition and décor is not merely spell-binding, it is case-putting”.

But in a world where, every time, Role trumps Self, the case that Sternberg puts, in Crime and Punishment and elsewhere, is far more than an essayistic musing. Sternberg’s “personal style”, wrote Flaus, “can be a form of self-definition, of defiance”. And his films are still today defying us to be ourselves.

© Adrian Martin April 2019