Scarlet Street (1945) Scarlet Street (1945)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Scarlet Street) | Backbeats (Scarlet Street)

Quick Facts

Director: Fritz Lang
Producer: Fritz Lang / Walter Wanger (Diana Production Company)
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols
Based on: La Chienne (1930) novel by Georges de La Fouchardière (and the play co-written with André Mouëzy-Éon); previously filmed by Jean Renoir as La Chienne (1931)
Starring: Edward G. Robinson (Christopher Cross), Joan Bennett (Katharine "Kitty" March), Dan Duryea (Johnny Prince), Margaret Lindsay (Millie), Rosalind Ivan (Adele Cross), Jess Barker (Janeway), Samuel S. Hinds (Charles Pringle), Arthur Loft (Dellarowe)
Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner
Editor: Arthur Hilton
Music: Hans J. Salter
Runtime: 102 minutes
Release Date: December 28, 1945 (US)
Distributor: Universal Pictures (Diana Production Company)
Status: Public domain in the United States (copyright not renewed)
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038057/

Overview

Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street is one of the bleakest American film noirs of the 1940s — a story in which a meek, henpecked middle-aged cashier is gulled by a young woman and her pimp into financing her, has his amateur paintings sold under her name to acclaim, embezzles from his employer to keep the deception going, and finally murders her with an icepick when the deception turns to mockery. The boyfriend is convicted and executed for the killing; the cashier, his confession dismissed as the babbling of a broken man, is never prosecuted but becomes a homeless wreck haunted by the voices of the lovers he made and destroyed. Adapted by Dudley Nichols from Georges de La Fouchardière's novel La Chienne (filmed by Jean Renoir in 1931), the picture was banned in New York, Atlanta, and Milwaukee for its frank treatment of adultery and unpunished murder. It is a tragedy in the framework's strict sense — worse tools, insufficient — and the wind-down's haunted-street ending is one of the most uncompromising in studio-era Hollywood.