Cesare Lombroso was a 19th century Jewish Italian scientist of slightly demented self-confidence in his powers of pattern recognition. He was more or less the inventor of criminology, which he saw as a branch of physical anthropology: you could tell a criminal just by his deformed face.

Hollywood casting directors are still practical Lombrosoians.

When I started reviewing movies, I’d take a notebook to jot down notes. After a year or two, I figured out that this was pretty useless in the micro sense in that most of what I wrote down turned out to be embarrassingly stupid and no help in writing reviews in which I tried to appear not as gullible as I had actually been sitting in the dark. But it was useful in the macro sense in that I had undeniable proof of how often I was fooled by the filmmakers.

For example, a common complaint of mine tended to be: “They cast an overly handsome actor as Thuggish Underling #2!!!” But it always turned out that if Thuggish Underling #2 was more appealing looking than you’d expect a thuggish underling to be, he was actually an undercover FBI agent, or eventually had a crisis of conscience that caused him to betray his Final Boss to side with the hero, or the like.

For example, a Ben Affleck–type is fated to be the hero unless he’s really trying to win an Oscar. An alarming Casey Affleck–type (such as the guy on the cover of this recent translation of Lombroso), however, can well be cast as a bad guy, but he’s also going to rivet the audience’s attention.

For example, about two hours plus into Oppenheimer, Casey Affleck suddenly dominates the movie for about ten minutes as anti-Communist White Russian U.S. military counter-intelligence officer Colonel Boris Pash. Is he the Bad Guy? Yeah, probably. But he’s also cast because he might possibly be a good guy.

Is there any truth to Lombroso’s theories of criminal faces?

Yeah, probably some. In the 1980s, Harvard social science heavyweights Richard J. Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson collaborated on the book Crime And Human Nature, in which they reviewed hundreds of post-WWII studies. I haven’t read it in decades, but my recollection is that they concluded that, yeah, criminals tend to be uglier than honest men.

But, on the other hand, so what? We have a criminal justice system that has lots of methods for delving deeply into the guilt or innocence of the accused, which is a good thing.

Moreover, while there’s a lot to criticize in Ronald A. Fisher’s 1925-1935 invention of statistical significance testing, it also did much to restrain Lombroso-style hog-wild speculating.

Lombroso strikes me as largely a comic character. From Nature:

Lombroso and Tolstoy
Paolo Mazzarello

Published: 22 February 2001
Nature volume 409, page 983 (2001)

An anthropologist’s unwitting gift to literature.

More than 7,000 participants attended the twelfth International Medical Congress of Moscow in August 1897. Among the prominent scientists there was Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, who presided over a session dedicated to mental illness.

Lombroso was world famous for his theory that genius was closely linked with madness. According to him, genius and madness were two faces of the same psychobiological reality—as in a non-Euclidean space in which the two extremes touch. A man of genius was a degenerate, an example of retrograde evolution, in whom madness was a form of biological compensation for excessive intellectual development.

This regression, the theory stated, produced its own phenotypic stigmata, such as the cranial asymmetry of Pericles, Kant and Dante; the sub-microcephaly of Descartes; the small stature of Horace, Plato and Epicurus. …

Lombroso’s participation in the Moscow Congress inspired him to test his theory about the pathology of genius. Why not meet Leo Tolstoy, the supreme genius of world literature, in his natural habitat, to scrutinize his features and confirm his theories by seeing Tolstoy’s degenerative aspects with his own eyes? … For Lombroso the writer represented the “true disguised genius of alienation … in whom, one might say, the sicker the body, the more sublime the [intellectual] products”. He imagined Tolstoy would be “cretinous and degenerate-looking.”

Of course, in reality, Tolstoy was an aristocratic chad, as Lombroso might have surmised from reading his novels, such as Hadji Murat, which features a young, vigorous, but not yet enlightened Tolstoy stand-in as a Russian army lieutenant fighting on the Caucasian front.

On arriving at Tolstoy’s house, Lombroso found himself face to face with a soldierly-looking old man, whose penetrating eyes and severe bony face seemed more like those of a good, solid peasant who had served in the army than those of a thinker. Physically there was nothing degenerate about him. His attitude was calm, correct and friendly; there was certainly method in his ‘madness’. …

Tolstoy, as artists tend to do, got the last word over Lombroso:

Some months after this visit, Tolstoy rewrote his last great novel, Resurrection, which had previously only existed in draft form. In the definitive text of Resurrection, Tolstoy added, among other things, a detailed description of the legal process and punishments current in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, in which Lombroso’s anthropological theories were discussed and rejected as immoral. Delinquency was not “evidence of degeneration of a delinquent type of monstrosity, as certain obtuse scientists explained them to the government’s advantage”, he wrote. When prince Dmitry Nekhlyudov (alias Tolstoy), the main character, seeks an answer to the problem of criminal deviance in Lombroso’s books, he finds that the more he reads and the more attentive he is to Lombroso’s words, the more disappointed he becomes. During a trial the public prosecutor quotes Lombroso and the latest ‘scientific’ theories on heredity, evolution and the born delinquent, to support his case against a prostitute falsely charged with murder. “He’s going too far,” the president of the court comments to a colleague. “A very stupid fellow,” the colleague agrees.

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