Scarlet Street
Directed by Fritz LangChristopher Cross is a mild-mannered cashier and Sunday painter who has spent decades in a loveless marriage to the shrewish Adele. One rainy night in Manhattan he rescues Kitty March from what appears to be an assault, unaware that her attacker is Johnny Prince, the small-time grifter she is involved with. Cross falls for Kitty with the quiet desperation of a man who has never been wanted, and begins stealing money from his employer to set her up in a Greenwich Village apartment.
Johnny quickly grasps that Cross's amateur paintings have genuine commercial value and engineers a scheme in which Kitty poses as the artist, attracting the attention of a gallery owner and eventually a wealthy collector. Cross, besotted and willfully blind, continues to paint and to pilfer, while Kitty strings him along at Johnny's direction. The triangle tightens when Cross's domestic circumstances shift unexpectedly, raising the possibility – briefly, devastatingly – that he and Kitty might actually build a life together.
Scarlet Street belongs to the cycle of American noir that imports the fatalism of French poetic realism and turns it against the myth of the self-made man. Adapted from Georges de la Fouchardière's novel La Chienne and Jean Renoir's 1931 film of the same name, Lang's version transplants the story to New York and invests it with a specifically American anxiety about class, desire, and the wages of delusion. The film's resolution is among the most morally unsettling in the classical Hollywood canon.
