By Lindsay Zoladz
I am doing a project this semester comparing some of Fritz Lang’s early German films to his later American noirs. So far, my conclusion is thus: dude made a staggering number of films, and a mind-blowingly large percentage of them are really, really, really good. There are about 12 of them I’d like to recommend to you right now (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is my all-time favorite, for the record), but I am going to limit myself to just talking about one I watched this weekend that totally blew me away: Scarlet Street.
Lang made Scarlet Street in 1945, a little over a decade after he fled Nazi Germany (his former wife and sometimes screenwriter Thea von Harbou stuck around, divorced him, and then joined the NSDAP, which is a fascinating little story in its own right) for Hollywood. He had found success the year before with his film The Woman in the Window, starring Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennet, so—why not?—he decided to recast the pair in Scarlet Street. Robinson plays Chris , a middle-aged, do-good cashier with a secret dream of being a painter who falls in love with Kitty (Bennet), a dark, deceitful vamp—the femme fatale incarnate. Along with her slimy fiance Johnny (truly one of the most disgusting and weasly villians the screen has ever seen), Kitty drags Chris down into a sinister underworld of deception, theft and, you know, other bad things.
There are a lot of details in Scarlet Street that make it even more intriguing than your run-of-the-mill noir. The gender politics of Chris and Kitty’s relationship are bizarre for the time; he’s always talking about feeling and emotion, and in one scene, he’s even seen wearing a flowery apron. Kitty, on the other hand, is all about her command of business, power, and money. People have argued about whether Johnny’s relationship to her is a literal or metaphorical pimp-and-prostitute thing, but either way, Lang’s style is subtle enough that he really leaves it up for you to decide. I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I’ll just say that it is so thoroughly unsettling and bizarre for an ending to a 1945 American film that I have no idea how it slipped past the mighty Hays Code. The film was banned in a few cities when it was first released (on charges of being “immoral”), but it ultimately earned its reputation as one of Lang’s best and most chilling American films.
The film is in the public domain, which means that no one has done an outstanding job of restoring it since it’s legally available to anybody for free. The print I watched was pretty awful, but apparently the print on the Kino DVD has been restored fairly well. Even if you can only get your hands on one of the fuzzy prints, though, this movie is absolutely worth seeing. Trust me, you will be shocked to see such a realistic death by ice pick in an American film from 1945. Ah, I’ve already said too much!
2 Comments
March 29, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Public Domain = not feeling guilty about watching movies on the internet. Search Google video to find the entire one hour and forty-one minutes.
May 22, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Fritz Lang is good, but if you wanna take a look at some great noir stuff, check out a few French films made around that time. one of my particular favorites is Le Corbeau.