Not really the travesty it might have been. If Richard Brooks was good at anything it was for making accessible big, classic novels that a cinema-going audience might otherwise have overlooked and for at least treating them with a degree of respect. I'm not sure this version of Dostoevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov" will have anyone rushing to read the original but it's a robust entertainment nevertheless. It's a family drama about the relationship between four brothers and their father, (like a Russian "Dallas"), and which, like all good family dramas, is a love/hate relationship.
Yul Brynner is the headstrong, black sheep of the clan, (he's actually very good here), and his brothers are Richard Basehart, (the clever one), William Shatner, (the saintly one), and Albert Salmi, (excellent as the illegitimate one) while Lee J. Cobb hams it up as the hated father. As the woman who throws herself at Brynner only to be jilted and as the father's mistress that Brynner falls for both Claire Bloom and, in particular, Maria Schell are outstanding. Of course, the novel is something of a door-stopper and all Brooks can do is zip through it making sure he gets in all the salient points and no-one would ever call this one of the great literary adaptations. By the time we get to the courtroom climax it all gets a bit silly but it's a juicy entertainment all the same.
Not really the travesty it might have been. If Richard Brooks was good at anything it was for making accessible big, classic novels that a cinema-going audience might otherwise have overlooked and for at least treating them with a degree of respect. I'm not sure this version of Dostoevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov" will have anyone rushing to read the original but it's a robust entertainment nevertheless. It's a family drama about the relationship between four brothers and their father, (like a Russian "Dallas"), and which, like all good family dramas, is a love/hate relationship.
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