Femme fatale Joan Bennett gets her claws into meek amateur painter Edward G. Robinson in Fritz Lang’s psychological film noir SCARLET STREET (courtesy Photofest)
SCARLET STREET (Fritz Lang, 1948)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, July 22, and Monday, July 23
Series continues through August 9
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
Director Fritz Lang and screenwriter Dudley Nichols’s adaptation of Jean Renoir’s 1931 La Chienne, based on the novel by Georges de La Fouchardière, is a transplanted German street film moved to New York City. Edward G. Robinson stars as Christopher Cross, one of the all-time-great saps in the history of cinema. A henpecked cashier at a large clothing store where he has just been given his twenty-five-year gold watch, Cross instantly falls in love with a floozy he meets on a rainy night, Kitty March (Joan Bennett), who is soon conspiring with her sleazy boyfriend, Johnny (Dan Duryea), to bilk Cross, thinking that he is a wealthy painter whose canvases go for upwards of fifty grand apiece. Meanwhile, Cross continues to think that Kitty is a good girl who will marry him if he were free. But as Chris’s suspicions about Johnny grow, so does the tension, leading to a classic noir finale. Filmed on Hollywood sets designed to resemble Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, Scarlet Street is a dark, somber psychological thriller built around a mark and a femme fatale, reminiscent of Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 tale The Blue Angel, in which Emil Jannings is willing to sacrifice everything for Marlene Dietrich. Robinson, so good at playing tough gangsters, shows a surprisingly vulnerable, tender side as Cross, who refuses to see the truth staring him in the face, just as his paintings lack proper perspective. Duryea has a field day as Johnny, while Bennett is appropriately shady as the deceitful moll. Scarlet Street is screening July 22-23 with John Farrow’s 1948 thriller, The Big Clock, starring Charles Laughton and Ray Milland, as part of Film Forum’s Universal 100, a wide-ranging celebration of the studio’s centennial that continues with such other double features as Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows, James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein and Edgar G. Ullmer’s The Black Cat, and Stanley Donen’s Charade and Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk.