This is not a review. See other comments of those who liked this film. For me, it is one of the two worst films of literary masterpieces I have ever seen, the other being The Sound and the Fury. The actors were all fine. The father is wrongly characterized but well played by Cobb. Brynner is excellent as Dmitri. They are less ambiguous and so more easily screened. There is no way that anyone could capture Ivan, though Basehart does his best. And Alexei? It's not Shatner's fault that this role is written so terribly. As you can see, I absolve the actors of the crime committed by the film. Perhaps it is not Maria Schell's fault, either, that she mugs and grins her way through her ridiculous part. But I kept wishing she would stop smiling, just once stop smiling whatever emotion she thinks she is conveying. I felt this intensely both when I saw the film in 1958 and 2010. If anything Schell is worse than Joanne Woodward in the Faulkner film when the latter says, "And this fine old house just falling to wrack and ruin about our ears" Nothing in the film Karamazov, of course, about how the "miraculously preserved" corpse of Zosima starts stinking in short order. And predictably, of course, not a hint of the Grand Inquisitor. The worst omission by far, however, is the boys shouting "Hurrah for Karamazov" at the end of the book. Critics once voted that line the greatest single line in all of literature, second only to "Look up Nicholas, look up!" in George Eliot's Middlemarch. It's not that I expect a film to capture anything but glimpses of a great work, but this film is a travesty. Marilyn Monore would have been a big plus, as she was in The Misfits. The first time I saw this film, I hadn't even read the book, which I've since read many times and tend to think is one of the world's greatest novels. Well, what can one expect from 1950s middlebrow Hollywood? It's like penciling a mustache on the Mona Lisa to make it more accessible. No thanks.
Review of The Brothers Karamazov
