The Best Crime and Punishment Movie or TV Adaptation, Compared

This book is unusually hard to film, and the reason is structural rather than technical. The murder happens early, the murderer is named immediately, and the remaining five parts are interior. Anything that compresses it turns into a manhunt. If you would rather be inside the interior part than watch someone else act it, the playable Crime and Punishment puts you in the rooms the adaptations keep cutting.

The 1979 BBC serial, and why it still holds up

The BBC made a three-part version in 1979, directed by Michael Darlow, with John Hurt as Raskolnikov and Timothy West as Porfiry Petrovitch, per the adaptations record in the novel’s own reference entry and the title record at IMDb. It is also the hardest of the major versions to find on a streaming service, so a reader who wants to check this verdict should expect to hunt for a disc or a library copy.

What it has is length used correctly. Three episodes is enough room to let the interrogation scenes run at conversational speed, which is the only speed at which they work: Porfiry’s method is delay, and a ninety-minute feature cannot afford delay. Hurt plays Raskolnikov as physically unwell rather than romantically tormented, which is what the text actually describes, and West plays Porfiry as somebody enjoying his job. Their scenes together are the reason viewers still hunt this version down decades after it aired.

The detail even good summaries get wrong

There is a specific error that keeps appearing in condensed versions of this story, including video summaries that are otherwise careful, and it is a useful test of any adaptation you are considering. The final confession is routinely staged as a confrontation with Porfiry, the detective who has been circling for five hundred pages. In the novel it is not. Raskolnikov confesses at an ordinary police office in front of Ilya Petrovitch, an assistant superintendent with no idea what is coming (gutenberg-2554 l.21478-21499).

You can see why the change is tempting. Handing the confession to Porfiry pays off the relationship the audience has been watching, and it makes the detective the protagonist of his own story. It also destroys the point. Dostoevsky deliberately denies his investigator the scene, because a confession extracted by the clever policeman is a procedural ending, and the novel wants a moral one. The full ending, including the sentence, is set out separately and carries spoilers.

What every version has to cut

Ranking adaptations of this novel is mostly a question of what each one decided to lose, because no screen version has ever carried all of it. Three things go first, in roughly this order.

• ✅The interior. Most of this book happens inside one head, in a running argument nobody else hears. Film can show a man sweating; it cannot show him constructing a justification and watching it fall apart in the same paragraph.
• ✅The Marmeladov family.The tavern, the yellow ticket, Katerina Ivanovna dying of consumption with three small children in a rented room — the strand that gives the novel its moral weather is usually reduced to Sonia alone.
• ✅The article.The scene where the detective reads the murderer’s own published theory back to him is talky, abstract and hard to stage, and it is also the hinge of the book. Versions that keep it tend to be the ones worth watching.

The Tavern Confession is the scene actors keep asking for: Marmeladov, drunk, telling a stranger exactly what his family has been reduced to. You are the stranger, and you can listen, walk out, or give him money you do not have. Role-play Crime and Punishment →

The other versions worth knowing about

This novel has been filmed for ninety years and in at least four languages, and the useful way to sort the versions is by how much room each one gives the talking.

• ✅The 2002 BBC Two serial. Two episodes, John Simm as Raskolnikov and Ian McDiarmid as Porfiry, per its own reference entry. Sharper and more modern in its camerawork, and the shorter format shows: the investigation compresses into something closer to a police drama.
• ✅The Soviet two-part film.Lev Kulidzhanov’s version with Georgy Taratorkin is the most literal reading of the book on film and the most patient, documented at its own entry. It is also the one that looks most like Petersburg, for obvious reasons.
• ✅The 1930s pair. A French film and a Hollywood one appeared in the same year, both listed in the adaptations record linked above. The Hollywood version is the interesting failure: it keeps the detective and the murderer and throws away the interior.

How to pick, if you only watch one

Start with the 1979 serial if you can find it, because it is the version that understood what the book is: two men talking in rooms, one of whom knows. Take the 2002 serial if you want something faster-moving and easier to stream. Take the Soviet version if you have already read the novel and want to see its Petersburg rather than somebody’s idea of it.

What no screen version really manages is the thing that makes Marmeladov’s tavern monologue unbearable on the page. He introduces himself by rank — “Marmeladov—such is my name; titular counsellor” (l.540) — and then works his way down to the question the whole novel is built on.

“Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?”

On screen that lands as a good actor doing a drunk scene. On the page it is a man asking a stranger a question that stranger is about to answer with an axe, and the free Garnett text at Project Gutenberg will give it to you in ten minutes of reading.