TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) with Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, Rosalind Ivan and Jess Barker

By David in TN
Friday, July 15, 2022 at 7:54:00 P.M. EDT

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) with Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, Rosalind Ivan and Jess Barker.

Film Noir Guide: “Robinson plays a henpecked husband (Little Caesar in an apron!), who uses his umbrella to protect a beautiful woman (Bennett) when she is attacked by what appears to be a mugger but is actually her drunken boyfriend (Duryea). Robinson gets lucky, knocking Duryea out cold and accompanying the damsel home. Flattered by Bennett’s attention, Robinson eventually becomes her sugar daddy, setting her up in an expensive apartment and paying for it with embezzled funds.

“Now if he could only figure a way to get rid of his shrewish wife (Ivan), who keeps an enormous portrait of her late husband in the living room. He would then be free to marry Bennett, a masochist who only has eyes for the vicious and scheming Duryea.

“Forced to paint in the bathroom because his wife can't stand the smell, aspiring artist Robinson moves his equipment and paintings into Bennett's new apartment. When Duryea tries to pawn a couple of the paintings, he’s told by an art critic (Barker) that the artist who painted them is a genius.

“The con man sees dollar signs and manages to convince an art gallery owner that Bennett is the painter. His get-rich-quick scheme works for a while but is doomed to end in tragedy.

“Robinson is sensational as the middle-aged patsy who foolishly allows himself to believe, to the ubiquitous strains of ‘Melancholy Baby,’ that a gorgeous young woman has fallen for him. Bennett and Duryea are terrific as the dysfunctional lovers. This was the second film for the Lang-Robinson-Bennett-Duryea team after their first joint venture in The Woman in the Window.”

David in TN: In his outro last week, Eddie Muller said Scarlet Street is a return to classic Noir territory.

N.S.: This should be head and shoulders above Red Eddie’s usual offerings. Joan Bennett was married at the time to independent producer Walter Wanger, who produced a series of films noir for his talented, stunning wife. (Often as not, imdb.com fails to mention Wanger’s role.) If Scarlet Street is good—I have yet to see it—it’s not merely due to Fritz Lang, whose work in America was typically mediocre, but because Wanger got him one of the greatest screenwriters ever, Dudley Nichols, and a brilliant cast, which included Edward G. Robinson and Dan Duryea. And if Bennett was unconcerned about working with the reportedly sadistic Lang, it was because he wasn’t her boss, she was his.

Fritz Lang, who for nine or ten years was the world’s greatest dramatic movie director—Dr. Mabuse, Dr. Mabuse, Part II (both in 1922), Metropolis (1927), “M” (1931), etc.—was only half a man on these shores. His second wife, Thea von Harbou, was the greatest screenwriter in the history of German pictures, and the greatest female screenwriter of all time, anywhere. Nobody else even comes close.

However, by the time Lang fled Nazi Gemany, he and von Harbou had divorced. She was an ardent Nazi, while he was an ardent amoral opportunist, not to mention a not-so-secret Jew. (He was the son of a Viennese Jewish mother who had raised him a Catholic, and who—the mother—then converted to Catholicism when he was 10.)

Nonetheless, Josef Goebbels was prepared to overlook the small matter of Lang being a Jew, if Lang were willing to be head of the Nazi movie studio, UFA. When Lang fled, von Harbou was named chairman of the organization of German sound movie authors.

(When I was a kid in 1973, I saw Lang interviewed on TV by Richard Schickel on The Men Who Made the Movies. Lang told a tensely dramatic story of Goebbels offering him the movie institute job, and Lang fleeing the same day, unable to get to the bank in time to withdraw his money. Great story, but the reality was much less dramatic. Lang didn’t flee the country for two weeks, which afforded him plenty of time to withdraw his money. Never believe any story that makes Fritz Lang out to be a hero.)

In America, Lang had little more than cotton, slaves, and arrogance—oops, wrong picture!—I meant a monocle, a Viennese accent, and arrogance, but his reputation from earlier, the monocle, and the arrogance sufficed to carry him through the rest of his life on these shores.