If a single work of classic literature planted the seed of the noir anti-hero that would take generations to develop, it just might be Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, which makes it all the more surprising that, despite the novel’s countless cinematic adaptations, only two can be considered part of the noir cycle. (An American b-picture, Alfred Zeisler’s 1946 Fear, offers a very loose, offbeat interpretation.) In Georges Lampin’s Crime et châtiment (US: Crime and Punishment), the tale is re-located from St. Petersburg to Paris and stars the marvelous Robert Hossein as the anxious college student Raskolnikov, here re-named René, who, in a fit of poverty-driven desperation, kills and robs a pawnbroker, then must contend with his moral anxiety and Christian guilt alongside the police investigation led by commissioner Gallet (played by Jean Gabin who might have played the lead had the film been made fifteen years earlier). Some details are changed, characters are consolidated, and the murder is delayed, but the adaptation is otherwise quite faithful; some might say it’s too faithful, lacking the visual innovation a mid-1950’s noir sensibility might apply. Yet, we’re treated to beautifully noirish sets: the prostitutes’ alley at night, the pawnbroker’s stairwell, Rene’s filthy apartment with mammoth tears in the wallpaper and a shard of a mirror on his bureau.