Crime and Punishment U.S.A.

It says a lot about George Hamilton's acting skills that his first credited performance was this starring - and very demanding - role. He shines as Robert Cole, a troubled young man with a troubling belief: Exceptional people shouldn't have to pay for their crimes. After blacking out near the scene of a murder, Cole captures the attention of the police and proceeds to play a deadly cat-and-mouse game with a tenacious cop, a beautiful stranger and a family foe.

1950s Southern California is as far from 19th-century Moscow as you can get... or is it? By radically changing the setting of Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, this moody thriller makes the dusty classic new, fresh and dangerous once again. Literary fans will be impressed, and film fans will delight in being reunited with this unique, sun-drenched, jazz-tinged noir opus.

Handsome, twenty-year-old George Hamilton had his first starring role in this so-so drama by Denis Sanders inspired by Feodor Dostoyevsky's novel CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. Robert Cole (Hamilton) is a law student whose certainty that he is a cut above anyone else leads him to murder a pawnbroker with the belief he is too good to get caught. But Inspector Porter (Frank Silvera) begins to suspect that Cole has blood on his hands, even before there is any real proof that he is guilty. As the two play the same cat-and-mouse game that drove Dostoyevsky's hero over the edge, the modern Roskolnikov finds himself in a steadily deteriorating situation.