A box-office hit in its day (despite being banned in three states), Scarlet Street is perhaps legendary director Fritz Lang's (M, Metropolis) finest American film. But for decades, Scarlet Street has languished on poor quality VHS tape and in colorized versions. Kino's immaculate new digital transfer, form a 35mm Library of Congress vault negative, restores Lang's extravagantly fatalistic vision to its original B&W glory.
When middle-aged milquetoast Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson, Double Indemntity, Little Caesar) rescues street-walking bad girl Kitty (Joan Bennett, The Reckless Moment) from the rain slicked gutters of an eerily artificial backlot Greenwich Village, he plunges into a whirlpool of lust, larceny and revenge. As Chris' obsession with the irresistibly vulgar Kitty grows, the meek cashier is seduced, corrupted, humiliated and transformed into an avenging monster before implacable fate and perverse justice triumph in the most satisfying downbeat denouement in the history of American film.
Both Scarlet Street producer Walter Wanger's wife and director Lang's mistress, Joan Bennett created a femme fatale icon as the unapologetically erotic and ruthless Kitty. Robinson breathes subtle, fragile humanity into Cross while super-heavy Dan Duryea, as Kitty's pimp boyfriend Johnny, skillfully molds "a vicious and serpentine creature out of a cheap, chiseling tin horn." (New York Times). Packed with hairpin plot twists form screenwriter Dudley Nichols (Stagecoach) and "bristling with fine directorial touches and expert acting" (Time), Scarlet Street is a dark gem of film noir and golden age Hollywood filmmaking at its finest.
