Product Details

• Actors: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Don Duryea
• Directors: Fritz Lang
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Timeless Multimedia
• VHS Release Date: December 1, 1991
• Run Time: 102 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303042287
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #226,550 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

In a way, Scarlet Street is a remake. It's taken from a French novel, La Chienne (literally, "The Bitch") that was first filmed by Jean Renoir in 1931. Renoir brought to the sordid tale all the color and vitality of Montmartre; Fritz Lang's version shows us a far harsher and bleaker world. The film replays the triangle set-up from Lang's previous picture, The Woman in the Window, with the same three actors. Once again, Edward G. Robinson plays a respectable middle-aged citizen snared by the charms of Joan Bennett's streetwalker, with Dan Duryea as her low-life pimp. But this time around, all three characters have moved several notches down the ethical scale. Robinson, who in the earlier film played a college professor who kills by accident, here becomes a downtrodden clerk with a nagging, shrewish wife and unfilled ambitions as an artist, a man who murders in a jealous rage. Bennett is a mercenary vamp, none too bright, and Duryea brutal and heartless. The plot closes around the three of them like a steel trap. This is Lang at his most dispassionate. Scarlet Street is a tour de force of noir filmmaking, brilliant and ice-cold.

When it was made the film hit censorship problems, since at the time it was unacceptable to show a murder going unpunished. Lang went out of his way to show the killer plunged into the mental hell of his own guilt, but for some authorities this still wasn't enough, and the film was banned in New York State for being "immoral, indecent and corrupt." Not that this did its box-office returns any harm at all. --Philip Kemp

Review

Masterfully directed by Fritz Lang, Scarlet Street is a bleak film in which an ordinary man succumbs first to vice and then to murder. Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) is a lonely man married to a nagging wife. Painting is the only thing that brings him joy. Cross meets Kitty (Joan Bennett) who, believing him to be a famous painter, begins an affair with him. Encouraged by her lover, con man Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea) Kitty persuades Cross to embezzle money from his employer in order to pay for her lavish apartment. In that apartment, happy for the first time in his life, Cross paints Kitty's picture. Johnny then pretends that Kitty painted to portrait, which has won great critical acclaim. Finally realizing he has been manipulated, Cross kills Kitty, loses his job, and because his name has been stolen by Kitty, is unable to paint. He suffers a mental breakdown as the film ends, haunted by guilt. Kitty and Johnny are two of the most amoral and casual villains in the history of film noir, both like predatory animals completely without conscience. Milton Krasner's photography is excellent in its use of stark black-and-white to convey psychological states. Fritz Lang is unparalleled in his ability to convey the desperation of hapless, naïve victims in a cruelly realistic world. --Linda Rasmussen, All Movie Guide

German-American master Fritz Lang produced and directed this gritty film noir for Universal Pictures, notable as the first Hollywood feature in which the real criminal goes unpunished. When a mild-mannered cashier (Edward G. Robinson) becomes enamored with an amoral woman (Joan Bennett), she ensnares him in an embezzlement scheme which leads to a murder. Her lover is fingered and executed for the murder, while Robinson's character gets off free. Lang's daring, almost assaultive imagery divided critics and audiences who might have expected less Gothic melodrama. Robinson and Bennett are chilling villains in an era when it was rare not to tack on a happy, or at least moralistic, ending. The script was adapted by Dudley Nichols from a French play filmed by Jean Renoir as La Chienne. --Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Much Better Than The Other DVD Releases Of This Title!, October 11, 2005

By 

Erik Rupp (Southern California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scarlet Street (Remastered Edition) (DVD)

Kino has promised a nice transfer of Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (from an archived print - one not used by anyone else for a DVD release). That is excellent news for fans of Film Noir. This is a very good to excellent movie (depending on your tastes), and it deserves much better than the shoddy treatment it has received on virtually all the other DVD releases of this title to date. The cast is excellent, and features Edward G. Robinson, Dan Duryea, and Joan Bennett.

If you are considering buying Scarlet Street, then the Kino version is the only one to buy.

(Update: The image on the Kino DVD is amazingly sharp when compared to the other versions currently available, but there is one minor issue with the Kino release; there are some instances of "combing," (visible scan lines or "ghosting"), in the picture. To the untrained eye it isn't very noticeable, if at all. There is no question that this, even with the minor combing issue, is still BY FAR the best release of this title ever on DVD. If you are going to buy Scarlet Street, definitely buy the Kino version.)

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Chris Cross Will Make You Jump, May 19, 2003

By 

Andrew McCaffrey "The Grumpy Young Man" (Satellite of Love, Maryland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Scarlet Street (DVD)

Poor Edward G. Robinson. That is to say, poor Christopher Cross, the character Robinson plays in SCARLET STREET (presumably no relation to the 80's pop "star" of the same name, although that would explain a lot). Chris is trapped in a loveless marriage to a woman who looks like Edith Bunker and acts like Archie. He's a middle-aged bank-cashier who has gone through life having never truly been loved nor having loved anyone himself. The one enjoyable thing he has in his life is his art, his paintings - which his totalitarian wife has banished to the bathroom, as she hates the smell of his paints. So, when this poor, downtrodden, lonely man happens upon a young and beautiful woman, it's easy to see how he could be utterly manipulated by her.

At first, I thought I was going to be bored by this film. It takes its time setting up the scenario and the various characters. But once the plot gets cooking, I was completely engrossed. I love a film that surprises me, and I simply could not guess where this story was going. As one nears the end, surprise revelations and unexpected bombshells come exploding out like fireworks. And every revelation was logical and consistent, but startling. I made several mental predictions, and after I started getting all of them wrong, I just sat back and let the film overtake me.

Fritz Lang's direction makes this a darker film than even the screenplay probably anticipated. There are several scenes that are still unsettling today. The more experimental sequences near the end are quite haunting. It's certainly not a feel-good movie; the only characters that aren't out and out despicable are merely pathetic. I won't give away the ending, but it's enough to say that there is no "...and they all lived happily ever after". People get what they deserve, and in SCARLET STREET, they deserve a hell of a lot of it.

The acting is quite good across the board, with a few notables. Edward G. Robinson is, of course, great. If that man ever gave a poor performance, then I have yet to see it. Here, he is playing against type -- an apron-wearing, totally dominated, shell of a man. He conveys a genuinely sad loneliness by his mere expressions as his confidence crumbles at every indignity and the way he desolately clings to any scrap of love he can find. You'd completely forget this was the man who played tough gangster Johnny Rocco in KEY LARGO. Dan Duryea is possibly laying it on a little thick as the sleazy, scheming boyfriend, but that sort of thing is what the role calls for. Joan Bennett rounds out the cast as Kitty March, the woman who lets Cross fall in love with her, and then takes him for as much cash as she can.

The DVD released by Alpha Video has some flaws. However, since it is the only one on the market at the moment, we're stuck with it. The picture is decent, but not what I would call great. There are a numerous scratches and the image is a little fuzzy. On one or two occasions, the movie skips a few seconds ahead. The sound quality I would describe as adequate, but muffled. A few times, I had to rewind because I couldn't hear what the actors were saying. It's not a wholly awful disc, but I wouldn't get your hopes up as to its overall quality. Perhaps a better print of this film will show up on DVD; until then, we'll have this. And this is quite a cheap disc, so it does have that advantage.

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It takes a Village., March 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Scarlet Street (DVD)

Greenwich Village, that is, which we learn was home to "hop-heads" and "long-hairs" in 1945 (!) Fritz Lang's masterpiece tells the story of a middle-aged bank clerk (Edward G. Robinson, dependably brilliant) who escapes the dreariness of his job and his marriage to a harpy by spending his Sundays indulging his only hobby: painting. His life gets considerably more exciting when he runs across Joan Bennett, a con-artist and tramp who -- with the help of her pimp, the always-amusing Dan Duryea -- proceeds to slowly drain his financial wherewithal. Of course, the greatest irony is that Robinson has conned the con-artists: they think he's a wealthy artist because, in his attempt to impress Bennett, he neglected to mention that he's a just a lowly bank cashier. The movie shows us a dizzying amount of untruths, scams, cons, misperceptions . . . nothing is what it seems. Truth is relative, baby. While Lang has a lot of fun with all the illusions, he also dedicates himself to the principle that no good -- or bad -- deed goes unpunished, and that great noir principle, the inescapability from Fate, starts weighing more and more heavily on our characters as they perambulate through their sundry fictions and cons. -- For the sake of historical interest, it should be noted that *Scarlet Street* is an American remake of Jean Renoir's excellent *La Chienne*. (This story was based on a French novel; hence the concern with painting. Needless to say, the story migrated easily to Greenwich Village during the budding of the beatnik movement.) Renoir, in his film, spends a considerable amount of time building up the characterizations -- at the expense of the plot, to some degree. Lang, however, correctly understood that these characters are not as inherently interesting as the situation itself, with its myriad variations on the theme of Reality and (or versus) Illusion. As a result, Lang's movie is rather more suspenseful than Renoir's. Also of note: *Scarlet Street* is a follow-up of sorts to Lang's previous movie, *The Woman in the Window*, which featured the same cast (Robinson, Bennett, and Duryea)! It's a masterpiece, too. [A special word of congratulations must go to "Alpha Video": Congratulations on crafting the ugliest-looking and poorest-sounding DVD I have ever seen or heard. It's a great thing, when masterpieces in the Public Domain can be snatched up by any unscrupulous producer. Simply burn an old magnetic-tape version onto a digital disc, press a few thousand copies, and voila! -- Instant profit. Bravo!]