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SCARLET STREET
1945
Director
Fritz Lang
Starring
Edward G. Robinson
Joan Bennett
Dan Duryea
Margaret Lindsay
Runtime
103 MINUTES
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Fritz Lang’s cynical, sordid noir SCARLET STREET was originally banned in several U.S. jurisdictions as indecent and immoral. It probably still should be!
After a chance meeting, unhappily married milquetoast and hobby painter Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) becomes infatuated with seductive bad-girl Kitty March (Joan Bennett). Kitty, for her part, takes Chris for a rich and famous artist, and, conniving with her vicious pimp Johnny Prince (archetypal noir villain Dan Duryea), begins squeezing the poor sap for every thing he’s got - including Chris’s suddenly-fashionable canvases.
A masterpiece of formal construction in which “nothing takes place only once” (Tom Conley), SCARLET STREET’s incisive mise-en-scene inscribes the pathological drama inside a maze of misleading appearances. The film’s barely concealed elements of masochism and voyeurism outraged the censors, and yet not even the Legion of Decency could have devised a more punitive denouement. Lang’s movie, packed with hairpin plot twists, is bleak and twisted in the best noir way.
After a chance meeting, unhappily married milquetoast and hobby painter Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) becomes infatuated with seductive bad-girl Kitty March (Joan Bennett). Kitty, for her part, takes Chris for a rich and famous artist, and, conniving with her vicious pimp Johnny Prince (archetypal noir villain Dan Duryea), begins squeezing the poor sap for every thing he’s got - including Chris’s suddenly-fashionable canvases.
A masterpiece of formal construction in which “nothing takes place only once” (Tom Conley), SCARLET STREET’s incisive mise-en-scene inscribes the pathological drama inside a maze of misleading appearances. The film’s barely concealed elements of masochism and voyeurism outraged the censors, and yet not even the Legion of Decency could have devised a more punitive denouement. Lang’s movie, packed with hairpin plot twists, is bleak and twisted in the best noir way.