Cinema: The New Pictures, Sep. 22, 1958

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Bird Fancier Plummer, annoyed at so much slaughter for the sake of milady's hat trimming, mushes off into the interior to talk sense to Cottonmouth. In and out he goes—between stopovers at a Miami bawdyhouse run by Old Zipper Gypsy Rose Lee—while Ives hurls insults at him and viewers catch swamp fever. Even more intriguing than trying to guess what Plummer is up to is the question of what Schulberg thought he was doing. In any case, moviegoers should prepare to take flight faster than a startled rookery of roseate spoonbills.

Crime and Punishment (Kingsley International). Dostoevsky's novel, published in 1866, has served as the basis for at least half a dozen movies since 1917. The newest version, set in modern-day France by able Belgian Scriptwriter Charles (We Are All Murderers) Spaak, offers nothing but sad emptiness in place of tragedy, pointlessness in place of enigma.

Raskolnikov is still a student, but named Rene (Robert Hossein), and he dresses in a duffel coat. In one supreme effort, he rises from his bed of resignation and hocks his watch, staring balefully at the old pawnbrokeress all the while. Mom and sis arrive in town and worry about him. "He's moody," decides sis, while a friend confides to him, "Your mother thinks you're sick." Thus reassured, he goes back and puts a dirk in the old pawnbrokeress, arousing the interest of a police inspector (Jean Gabin) whose sleuthing practice is to "sit and wait."

He and the viewer wait a precious long time. As seeded by Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov was a thundercloud pouring out a torrent of social, financial and religious defiance. Rene, as squeezed out by the movie adapters, is a hapless drip, and the characters around him create a splash no larger.