Scarlet Street: Lang's Portrait of a Sap

Christopher Cross has worked twenty-five years as a cashier for the same firm. At the dinner where they give him his watch, he watches his boss leave with a beautiful young woman, and something in him — a man in his fifties with a hectoring wife and a locked bathroom he paints in on Sundays — quietly comes loose. Scarlet Street, directed by Fritz Lang in 1945 for Diana Productions and released through Universal, is what happens to that loose thing over ninety-eight minutes. It is the meanest film Lang made in America, and it is mean in a specific way: it never once lets you feel superior to the man it is destroying.

Lang had made The Woman in the Window the previous year with the same three leads — Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea — and Scarlet Street reads on paper like the sequel nobody asked for. It is better than the film it repeats. Dudley Nichols adapted Georges de La Fouchardière’s novel La Chienne, which Jean Renoir had already filmed in 1931 with Michel Simon, and Lang’s version keeps Renoir’s brutal outline while replacing the French film’s shrugging naturalism with something colder and more architectural. Renoir observed a man’s ruin. Lang engineers it.

The mechanism

Walking home from that dinner, Chris (Robinson) sees a man striking a woman under a streetlamp in Greenwich Village and intervenes with his umbrella. The woman is Kitty March (Bennett). The man is Johnny Prince (Duryea), and he is not a stranger to her — he is the boyfriend she is devoted to, in the way that only a woman being systematically used can be devoted.

Chris, dazzled, lets Kitty believe he is a wealthy painter. Kitty tells Johnny, who hears “wealthy” and stops listening. What follows is a con built by two people too stupid to run it well, on a mark too infatuated to notice, and the film’s genius is that everyone in it is out of their depth. Johnny’s scheme is not sophisticated. Kitty’s performance as an interested woman would not survive contact with a sceptical mind. Chris has no sceptical mind available. He embezzles from the firm he has served for a quarter-century, installs Kitty in an apartment, and paints there, and when his canvases attract the attention of a serious critic, Johnny sees the second grift inside the first: sell the paintings with Kitty’s name on them.

That is the trap, and it is a beautiful one, because it gives Chris exactly what he wants. He does not care about credit. He is a man who has never been looked at, and Kitty is looking at him, and the paintings hanging in a gallery under her name are the closest he will come to being loved. He signs his own erasure and calls it romance.

Why it works: Lang’s geometry, Robinson’s smallness

The film is photographed by Milton Krasner, and its visual argument is confinement. Chris exists in boxes — the cashier’s cage at the office, the tiny bathroom where he paints, his flat where his wife Adele (Rosalind Ivan) shouts at him beneath a portrait of her heroic dead first husband, a policeman whose framed face hangs on the wall watching Chris fail to be a man. Lang, who trained as an architect and had spent the German years building Metropolis out of pure design, films rooms as verdicts. Chris is always slightly too large for his frame and slightly too small for his life.

Then there is Robinson, who had spent the early 1930s being the definitive screen gangster in pictures like Scarface’s milieu of snarling pre-Code hoods, and who here plays a man with no aggression in him at all. He gives Chris a soft, apologetic bearing, a habit of ducking his head, a smile that arrives half a second late and asks permission. It is a performance of enormous technical control that reads as no performance whatsoever. Robinson understood something about the character that the script only implies: Chris is not sad about his life. He has simply never considered that a different one was on offer, and Kitty’s arrival is less a temptation than a rumour of a country he had not known existed.

Duryea is the other engine. Johnny Prince is a whining, preening, physically cowardly parasite in a loud tie, and Duryea plays him with a high, complaining voice and a laugh like a dropped plate. He is the sort of villain who is genuinely unpleasant to be around, and Lang never gives him a moment of style to hide behind. The film’s cruellest structural joke is that Kitty adores this man and despises Chris, and that the two of them — the adored and the despising — are equally deluded about what they are worth.

Bennett is the hardest role and does the most with it. Kitty is not clever. She is not a schemer. Bennett plays her as a bored, indolent, casually cruel young woman who has been told she is beautiful and has drawn no further conclusions, and whose contempt for Chris is so instinctive she barely notices she is expressing it. When she laughs at him it is worse than any femme fatale’s calculation, because it is sincere.

The Code, and the punishment Lang invented

Scarlet Street had censorship trouble immediately. It was banned outright in New York State, in Milwaukee and in Atlanta, and the objections were about more than the killing. The Production Code required that crime be punished on screen, and the Code’s administrators were being asked to approve a film in which the legal machinery arrives at an outcome nobody involved deserves.

Lang’s answer to the Code is the most interesting thing in his American career. He accepted the requirement and then satisfied it in a register the censors had no vocabulary for. The punishment in this film is not administrative. Lang argued the point himself in later interviews: he considered a conscience a more reliable executioner than a courtroom, and he built the last reel to prove it. Whether the Breen Office understood what it had passed is doubtful. What it passed is a film in which damnation is a private, permanent, entirely internal arrangement — which is, if you think about it, considerably less comforting than a scaffold.

The ancestor and the descendants

For the collector, the essential companion is Renoir’s La Chienne, which tells the same story and ends with a shrug of Gallic amusement, its ruined man wandering off into a Paris that does not care. Lang saw the same plot and found no comedy in it whatsoever. Watching the two in a row is the clearest lesson available in what a director actually contributes: identical events, opposite universes.

Inside Lang’s own work, the necessary double bill is The Woman in the Window — same director, same year-ago cast, same premise of a respectable middle-aged man undone by a portrait of a woman — and the pairing is instructive precisely because one of the two films flinches and the other does not. Reach back further and you find M, where Lang had already established his lifelong subject: guilt as a physical condition, and a man pursued by something that has no jurisdiction and no mercy.

Its American cousins are the films about ordinary saps who volunteer for their own destruction. Double Indemnity, a year earlier, gives its sap a brain and an insurance man’s arrogance, which makes his fall a tragedy of competence. Detour, released the same year on a fraction of the money, strips the type down to a whining piano player and reaches the same floor. Chris Cross sits between them and is sadder than either, because Walter Neff wanted money and Al Roberts wanted a girl in California, and Chris only ever wanted somebody to look at his paintings.

My verdict, with the machinery below the line: Scarlet Street is Lang’s best American film and one of the two or three cruellest studio pictures of the 1940s, and its cruelty is earned rather than displayed. It refuses the consolation that the genre almost always smuggles in — the sense that the doomed man at least got to live a little first. Chris gets nothing. He is robbed of his money, his work, his name and his self-respect by two people who are not even good at it. The film’s final position is that the universe does not require competent villains to destroy you. Ordinary greed and ordinary vanity will do, and they will do it to a man whose only crime was wanting to be seen.

It circulates widely and has for decades — the film’s copyright lapsed, and grey public-domain prints did it no favours for years. Kino’s restoration is the one worth finding; Krasner’s blacks matter here, and a muddy transfer flattens the cage.

Spoilers below

Chris discovers the whole architecture at once. He learns that Kitty and Johnny are lovers, that the devotion he thought was aimed at him has always been aimed at a man who beats her, and that the paintings hanging under Kitty’s signature have made “Katherine March” a name in the New York art world. He goes to her apartment and asks her to marry him anyway — the last humiliation, which he inflicts on himself — and Kitty, drunk and finally past pretending, laughs in his face and tells him what he is.

He kills her with an ice pick from the bedside, stabbing through the bedclothes in a scene Lang keeps almost entirely off-screen. Then the film performs its trick. Johnny, the loud, cowardly, obviously guilty boyfriend with a police record and a public history of violence towards the dead woman, is arrested, tried and convicted. Chris says nothing. At the trial he perjures himself by omission, and Johnny goes to the electric chair for a murder Chris committed, screaming that he is innocent, which he is.

Lang films the execution’s aftermath and then keeps going, and this is where the film becomes something other than a noir. Chris is not caught. He is never going to be caught. He confesses to the police and they laugh at him — a nobody claiming a famous murder — and there is no mechanism left by which he can be punished. So he punishes himself, endlessly and without possibility of parole. He loses his job, his home, his mind. He hears the voices of Kitty and Johnny murmuring endearments to each other in his head, permanently, a soundtrack he cannot switch off, and he attempts to hang himself and fails at that too.

The last sequence is one of the great endings. Chris, now a derelict, shuffles down a street in front of a gallery window, and through the glass a portrait is being carried out — his own self-portrait — sold for ten thousand dollars to a collector who believes it is the work of the late Katherine March. He watches his masterpiece leave under another name, murmurs to himself, and walks on into the crowd, and the voices go with him. Lang gives him no death, no arrest, no release. He gives him a life sentence with the lovers talking in his ear forever, and the Production Code, which demanded that crime be punished, signed off on it.