The Hollywood career of Fritz Lang will be celebrated with two-week series at Film Forum (photo courtesy Photofest)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
January 28 – February 10
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
Following a spectacular career in Germany that included such masterful films as DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (1922), DIE NIBELUNGEN (1924), METROPOLIS (1927), and M (1931), Viennese director Friedrich Christian Anton “Fritz” Lang was beckoned to Hollywood, where he continued making high-quality works, primarily in the noir crime genre. Film Forum will be honoring his impressive transition to American cinema with a two-week, twenty-two-film retrospective of his complete Hollywood canon, featuring many of the silver screen’s greatest, from Spencer Tracy, Broderick Crawford, and Lee Marvin to Sylvia Sidney, Rhonda Fleming, and Marilyn Monroe, as well as Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, George Sanders, and Anne Baxter. The series begins January 28-29 with a double feature of THE BIG HEAT (1953) and HUMAN DESIRE (1954), both starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, and includes such other great twin bills as THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944) and SCARLET STREET (1945) on January 30, MINISTRY OF FEAR (1944) and MAN HUNT (1941) on February 4-5, and CLASH BY NIGHT (1952) and RANCHO NOTORIOUS (1952) on February 6-7.
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, 1945)
Sunday, January 30, 3:25, 7:20
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 at Film Forum on January 30 as part of a double feature with Lang’s THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, which also involves Robinson, Bennett, and Duryea caught up in a sordid story of art, blackmail, and other grim pursuits.