Scarlet Street

Screening on Film

Directed by Fritz Lang.
With Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea.
US, 1945, 35mm, black & white, 102 min.

Inspired by Jean Renoir’s 1931 La Chienne, Scarlet Street was the debut film of Diana Productions, the independent production company Lang founded with actress Joan Bennett and her husband, Walter Wanger. This brilliantly sustained tour de force—another film noir—reprises the three principle actors from Woman in the Window to tell the story of middle-aged Chris Cross (Robinson), an impeccably honest bookkeeper and amateur painter whose life changes radically after he falls in love with a prostitute and becomes the object of her pimp-boyfriend’s machinations.