Word: myshkin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wagon that carries his Teddy bear. At night he goes back to the abandoned factory where a gang of derelicts chases him through the cellars with a terrible silent intensity. As interpreted with a marvelous simplicity by Taylor Mead, a Beat poet, the hero is part Chaplin and part Myshkin -a holy idiot, unaccommodated...
What happened to Dostoevsky's four part masterpiece shouldn't happen to an idiot. First Director Ivan Pyriev and his collaborators at Mosfilm Studios decided to cut the last three-fourths of the novel. Next they relieved Prince Myshkin of his epilepsy, replacing it with a halo. To complete the transformation they added an exaggeratedly romantic, musical score, and put grease on the actors' faces (to make them look involved), and used a color technique that turned flesh into the inside of an orange peel...
Nonetheless, the melodrama is great. In rapid succession come plotting, secret messages, angry confrontations, unruly mobs, public confessions, and sledge rides through the Petersburg snow. Through all this, Prince Myshkin appears as a bewildered innocent whose honesty creates more difficulties than it resolves. With the balance tipped so heavily in favor of overdone lavishness the potentially moving utterances of Dostoevsky's Christ sound bizarre and ungenuine...
...pupil occasionally rolls out of sight. At any rate, Dostoevsky's amorphous novel of a young prince whose saintly behavior merely confuses his feral companions has once again proved to be unfilmable. The 1948 French version at least had the advantage of a magnificent portrayal of Prince Myshkin by the late Gerard Philipe, who was almost unknown at the time. Like everyone else in the Russian film, the present Myshkin, Yuri Yakovlev, acts at the top of his voice, generally while striding up and down in a pattern that would be understandable if he were carrying bagpipes. A good...