L'idiot

Georges Lampin gets out of his way to sound Russian ,like all the French directors who came before and took classics to the screen ,and they were numerous,mainly in the thirties .Lampin would return to Russia with his own "Crime Et Chatiment"in 1956 in a Frenchified version.

here ,only a poster in Russian for a concert,the Kopeks ,a brief moment of folk music and the names (with a view on the town,shown to make us comprehend that man's world is that of corruption,selfishness, self-interested motives,and money matches.The stellar cast ,including Marguerite Moreno,Lucien Coedel,Edwige Feuillère ,give their characters substance .But the stand out is Gérard Philippe,the man with the child in his eyes,who is not at the top of the cast and credits because he was relatively unknown (he was also credited as "supporting" in the contemporary "Pays Sans Etoiles").Philippe's last scene is absolutely prodigious and compares favorably with what Hitchcock would do with Anthony Perkins in the last pictures of "psycho" .