Scarlet Street (1945)

Directed by Fritz Lang. Starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, Margaret Lindsay, Rosalind Ivan, Charles Kemper, Jess Barker, Arthur Loft, Anita Sharo-Bolster, Vladimir Sokoloff, Russell Hicks, Samuel S. Hinds.

The director and stars of The Woman in the Window reteam for another noir, a redo of Jean Renoir’s La Chienne. It’s not easy buying Robinson as a meek dupe, but he pulls it off; he’s a browbeaten retail employee and amateur painter who’s clocked as a sucker by femme fatale Bennett and sleazy boyfriend Duryea. Takes a little too long to get going, but once it establishes a steady rhythm and introduces dark irony to all the seedy chiseling and love-blind impetuousness, the pot boils over. Duryea’s slimy vocal mannerisms get old after a while, but it’s a specific style of rank immorality he’s going for, and he was one of the best in the business for it; Ivan makes more of the harridan wife role than there initially appears to be on the page. In lieu of a fatalistic finale for the last crook standing, he or she gets a haunting dose of poetic justice, and it escaped the censorship of the Hays Code by appeal, though it was banned in some parts of the country for a period of time. Scripted by Dudley Nichols; photographed by Milton R. Krasner.

72/100