L'idiot

First time i saw this film was 1947 - in Germany,synchronized into German.A few weeks ago, i was lucky to get a copy in the original, french language. It was a pleasure to see it after so many years. Young Gerard Phillipe was an ideal

Prince. Many scenes of him were silent, in big close-ups. Beautiful

photography,somehow he overshadowed all the other actors. The last, long

close-up from him is as impressive and horrible, as it was so many years

ago,when I saw it beiing only 20 years old.It is a short film - 92 minutes, but it gives the idea, how the book is. I think, there a not to many people who still read Dostoyewsky to-day. The film describes short and clear all the many characters and underlines the main events of the book. This is only one persons opinion. It is a shame, that it is so hard to get a copy of this film - it is a beautiful film.

Stiffly directed, clumsily edited, weighed down with pointless shots to show off Leon Barsacq's sumptuous sets of 19th century Saint Petersburg, this is still a scorching and hypnotically beautiful romantic melodrama thanks to the sheer magic of its two lead actors. In his first major film role - as the pious Prince Myshkin - Gerard Philippe radiates the most sexualised saintliness you are ever likely to see on screen. As Natasha Filipevna, the doomed courtesan he falls in love with, Edwige Feuillere is at once meltingly sensual and hard-as-nails - a romantic dominatrix in luscious Escoffier gowns, who falls victim to her own finer instincts.

Mind you, I've no idea how this film will play to fans of Dostoevsky. (Personally, I have always loathed his work, finding it an exercise in boring pseudo-spiritual navel-gazing.) Yet for the same crowd of doomed romantics who adored Garbo in Anna Karenina or Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago (and may not give a toss for Tolstoy or Pasternak) this is one film to track down at all costs. Admirers of 'deep' Russian fiction will most likely be apoplectic, but don't they all just love to be miserable anyway?

This is still in many ways the finest screen version and effort of squeezing Dostoyevsky's mammoth novel into the frames of a 90 minutes movie, but it is not a failure, on the contrary no one else has been able to make such a beautiful comprimation of the gigantic novel while still maintaining its major content; and it's above all the actors that make this film wholly commendable, especially Gérard Philppe as Mushkin, and there has never been a more convincing Mushkin on the screen. Aglaia and Nastasia Filippovna are also perfect, and the film has been endowed with a wonderful music score, enhancing its beauty and esthetic qualities. It is early in black-and-white but still stylistically perhaps the best effort to put the novel Dostoyevsky himself regarded as his best into a comprehensive screen version.

I saw this film 1947 . all I remember a few very impressive close- ups. by the time i read the book (twice) the film completely was forgotten. all i have left is the 11x14 german language 4 page film- program.the photography is outstanding. I would like to see this film again,but do not know if a video is available.

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" .