Notes on a pre-Nazi-era German movie adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov

I watched Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931) a few days back, on Youtube. As the name suggests, the movie is a pre-Nazi-era German adaptation (by a Russian emigre named Fjodor Ozep) of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevski. In the final shot, Dimitri, being sent off to Siberia in a train, waves to Grushenka, who claims that she will follow him there. Watching that scene is a bit of an eerie experience, for we know the locomotive-signified horrors that followed in the next two decades.

I haven't read The Brothers Karamazov yet. The interesting thing is that I share this situation with Jorge Luis Borges, who watched Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff in the year of its release without having read the book. This is what Borges said of the film:

I'm not familiar with the cavernous novel from which this film was extracted, a felix culpa allowing me to enjoy it without the constant temptation to compare the present spectacle with the remembered book in order to see if they coincide. Pristinely disregarding, therefore, its irreverent desecrations and virtuous fidelities--both unimportant--I find the present film most powerful. Purely hallucinatory, neither subordinate nor cohesive, its reality is no less torrential than Josef von Sternberg's Dock of New York. Among the high points is a depiction of genuine, candid joy after a murder: the sequence of shots--approaching dawn, huge billiards balls awaiting collision, Smerdiakov's clerical hand taking the money--is brilliantly conceived and executed.

According to me, there were some other notable sequences in the movie as well:

• The horse carriage blazing through to take Dimitri to the gypsy bordello where he will confront Grushenka and her previous lover. The cross-cutting in the scene is marvelous, creating an effect of celerity that later movie-makers, with much better technology, often fail to match
• Dimitri's walks through the bordello - the one when he enters and assesses the situation; and the second when he throws out Grushenka's ex-lover. In both cases, the camera trails or leads the actors, there is one long shot. Much has been made of Birdman, and Innaritu's delivery of the theater-y perception that comes with the long shot. A similar level of deftness is on display in Der Morder..., and with much clunkier equipment. 
• The party in the bordello. Anna Sten, who plays Grushenka, delivers an amazing performance there. A lot has been rightly made of the gypsy dance of Maria Schell in the 1958 Hollywood adaptation, but in this movie the director is more concerned with the milieu that Dimitri and Grushenka find themselves in. The camera is in love with Anna especially, which is not saying much because at that time she was married to Fjodor Ozep, the director of the movie.

Watch the first, and part of the second in this video below:

Watch the gypsy sequence below. The shots that Borges mentioned are in this video:

Watch Maria Schell's gypsy dance in the 1958 Hollywood adaptation below:

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