Scarlet Street (Diana Productions, Universal, 1945, released 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s feature was a long-time favorite of mineI Scarlet Street, directed by Fritz Lang for a short-lived production company called Diana, released by Universal, and the second film in a row Lang directed with stars Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, produced by her then-husband, Walter Wanger. Like the first, The Woman in the Window, this wasa film noir which cast Robinson as a helpless nerd – a bank clerk this time instead of a professor, the role he’d played in The Woman in the Window – who as the film opens is getting a watch at a banquet held in his honor to celebrate his 25th anniversary with the same company. That night Robionson’s character, Christopher Cross (whom Bennett’s jokingly referred to as “Criss Cross”) comes upon an altercation between Kitty March (Joan Bennett) and Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea in his third film for Lang, after Ministry of Fear and The Woman in the Window). He thinks Johnny is raping Kitty and intervenes to stop what he thinks is a sex crime in process, though when he returns to the scene Johnny has fled and Kitty is there. Chris is instantly smitten with Kitty, but what he doesn’t know is that Kitty is actually Johnny’s lover. Though screenwriter Dudley Nichols couldn’t spell it out that Kitty is a prostitute and Johnny is her pimp, the true nature of their relationship is obvious to anyone with more experience of the real world than Chris.

Chris is married to Adele (Rosalind Ivan), and between her nagging and the sheer drudgery of his job, his only moments of joy are creaing the paintings he makes as an amateur on Sundays. Christ and Kitty have a lunch date in which both of them lie about who they are and what th ey’re doing; Chris tells Kitty he’s a famous painter whose canvases are sold in Europe, and Kitty tells Chris she’s an actress. ON the basis of Chris’s lies, Kitty and Johnny decide he must have lots of money, and Johnny tells Kitty to keep dating Chris and take him for all she can get. Kitty gets Chris to stake her to an apartment in Greenwich Village with a room suitable for an art studio, and Kitty explains Johnny’s presence in her life by saying he’s the boyfriend of her roommate Molly (Margaret Lindsay, still playing the vilainess’s good but hapless friend the way she did in all those Bette Davis movies at Warner Bros.) Adele keeps a large painting of a dog-faced man who’s her first husband, a police officer until he got killed trying to rescue someone from drowning – or at least so we, she and Chris think. When Adele threatens to take Chris’s paintings to the junkman, Chris takes them to Kitty’s place instead after first leaving two of them on consignment with a street dealer.

The paintings are spotted by art critic Damon Janeway (Jess Barker) and dealer Dellarowe (Arthur Loft), both of whom proclaim the artist as an undiscovered genius. Johnny gets Kitty to pose as the artist herself, and “her” paintings become an instant success. Chris doesn’t mind that Kitty is getting credit and money for his paintings, but things take a turn when Adele’s first husband turns up alive after all. Chris embezzles from the bank he works for to pay him off, and then gots to Kitty’s to tell her the good news that he’s single after all and they can get married. Only he walks in on Kitty and Johnny in the throes of sexual passion – or as close to it as the Production Code would allow – and when Chris tells Kitty they’re free to marry, Kitty tells Chris in no uncertain terms that he’s always repulsed her and her only interest in him was his (supposed) money. Chris withdraws to the nearest bar and then returns and kills Kitty, stabbing her repeatedly with an ice pick and either consciously or unwittingly setting up Johnny to take the fall. Johnny is duly arrested, convicted and executed for Kitty’s murder, but Chris is caught having embezzled and, though his boss doesn’;t have the heart to have him arrested, he naturally fires him. The film ends with Chris a street derelict, repeatedly walking up to police officers offering to confess to Kitty’s murder, and as we see hm oh the street passing by the Dellarowe gallery we see Kitty’s portrait changing hands for $10,000 and the painting looks as if she’s malevolently staring at Chris as it’s carried past himi by its new owner.

Scarlet Street began life as a French novel called La Chenne (literally, “The Bitch”) by Georges de la Fouchardière. who later turned it into a play with the help of co-author André Mouézy-Éon. IN 1931 French director Jean Renoir bought the movie rights and filmed it as La Chienne, and he and his co-writer André Girard were unsurprisingly more sexually frank about the material than Lang and Nichols could be with the Production Code Administration breathing down their necks, Surprisingly, the part of the material that most upset Code enforcer Joseph Breen wasn’t the sexual content but the fact that Chris was not formally punished for Kitty’s murder. In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for The Celluloid Muse in 1969, Lang recalled tell;ing Breen, “Look, we’re both Catholics. By being permitted to live, the Robinson character in Scarlet Street goes through hell. That’s a muchg reater punishment than being imprisoned for homicide. After all,it was not a premeditated murder; it was a crime of passion. Whaat if he does spend the rest of his life in jail – so what? The greater punishment is surely to have him go legally free, his soul burdened by the knowledge of his deed, with the words of the woman he loved proclaiming her love for the man he’d wrongly sent to death in his place.”

Incidentally I’d misremembered the murder scene; I’d thought Chris had actually killed Kitty on the spot instead of leaving the room,having a drink at the local bar, and then returning to kill her. That’s still a more convincing scene than its equivalent in Renor’s film, in which he goes home, sleeps on it and returns the next morning to kill her – which does make it seem premeditated. I don’t know whether Dudley Nichols was thinking of the Production Code when he wrote the version of the scene in Scarlet Street, but it’s arguably stronger in Nichols’ version; we don’t see Chris as the sort of person who’d be capable of a premeditated murder, but he does seem believable as a man who might respond to his betrayal by killing the woman who betrayed him on the spot. It’s also ironic to see Edward G. Robinson playing a man who hungers after the great masterpieces by French painters like Cézanne and Utrillo which he can’t afford to buy,when in real life he used much of his income as a movie star to buy the great works of French art.

And as I noted in my comments on the film The Whole Town’s Talking, a 1935 gangster comedy in which Robinson played a dual role – a milquetoast and a gangster – I noted that in Scarlet Street, though he’s playing just one character, he likewise flips from milquetoast to criminal in the bat of the proverbial eye. I first saw Scarlet Street in the early 1970’s at the Cento Cedar Cinema in San Francisco – the venue in which I first saw a lot of classic films, including the stunning Busby Berkeley musical The Gang’s All Here (which ran for nearly a year there, mainly because it became a cult item among San Francisco’s Gay community). I’m sure I’d run it before for my husband Charles,but he didn’t recall it – though he remembered the basic plot from the time we’d watched the original Jean Renoir La Chienne, based on the same story. And this wasn’t the only time Lang remade a Renoir film; he did it again in 1954 with Human Desire, a remake of Renoir’s 1938 French film La Bête Humaine (“The Human Beast”) based ono Émile Zola's novel, of which I have only dim memories, mostly of Paul Douglas’s overbearing and wretched performance in the lead.