Scarlet Street
This 1945 film noir, from director Fritz Lang, has long been considered a classic, but for many years it languished in a public-domain hell, in which anyone with a murky, awful print could run off a VHS or DVD and market it to the public. Opportunities to see the film in its pristine form were rare, but this Blu-ray corrects the situation.
The black-and-white cinematography looks great, and now you can tell that Joan Bennett — a natural blonde who dyed her darker for her noir incarnations — wasn’t raven haired, but rather a brunette. The story of a mild-mannered, sexually inexperienced married man (Edward G. Robinson), who gets involved with a scheming prostitute (who mistakenly thinks he has money) and her pimp boyfriend (Dan Duryea), this is a film in which every character is human and understandable and yet everyone is just no good, even most of the minor characters.
The performances are superb. Duryea is magnificent as the consummate sleazy opportunist, an idiot who thinks that he’s a genius. Joan Bennett plays the prostitute as a sexy slob, spitting out grape pits and letting her apartment become a pigsty. And Robinson, best known for playing gangsters, is an ideal milquetoast, tentative and fearful but with a repressed fire beneath the surface.
This is an unusual noir in that it doesn’t exactly revolve around a crime (though criminal activity is ultimately a factor). It also deals with the art world, with Robinson playing a weekend painter. In fact, Robinson was a major art aficionado, with paintings by artists such as Matisse, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne and van Gogh in his private collection. — Mick LaSalle