This is the kind of film, which you wonder how it ever got made, but in a good way. It seems to be the result of either a very low budget or some real out of the box thinking to transfer Dostoyevsky's classic to contemporary Los Angeles. Yet somehow the cinematography showing the seedy underbelly of sunny Southern California is perfectly evocative of the kind of desperation, want and need in the original novel.
George Hamilton, never a very convincing dramatic actor, does well in his first starring role as the murderer who can't resist teasing the inspector who seems to know from the beginning that Hamilton is guilty, in a plot device with another reviewer compared to Colombo. The final dénouement will be well known to readers of the novel or viewers of prior versions of the film.
The supporting cast is uniformly good, especially Frank Silvera as the police inspector and John Harding who plays Hamilton's sister's seducer. The jazz soundtrack adds to the dissonance and confusion of the lead character as he tries to evade discovery, while flirting with it at the same time. The film has a vibe similar to "Odds Against Tomorrow."
Clearly, this film wouldn't be for everybody. But I think that followers of the novel, which is still a great read whether or not, you've read it once or four times, will appreciate that whatever led the producers to transfer the setting to Southern California, and budget considerations or not, did an immense service to the novel by putting it in the glare and scrutiny of a dry, parched, California summer, where, instead of beach and sand and surf, that usually accompanies such scenery, you see desolate parking lots, cheap motels, and urban squalor as background to the characters and their melodramatic conflicts.
I think if you view this movie with an open mind, you will find it as unusual and fascinating as I did. Adaptations like this are rare enough. Of course, we are used to such stories been told on PBS with English actors with British accents playing the lead roles. Here you see that in America, we can update a classic and still keep it fascinating and current.
