Scarlet Street

A meek cashier and Sunday painter, Christopher Cross, is picked up by a woman who thinks he’s a famous artist — and by the boyfriend who sees a mark. Fritz Lang’s 1945 masterpiece, made in America more than a decade after he fled Hitler and the UFA studio of M and Metropolis, is one of the coldest, most essential films noirs. Lang was then at the height of his Hollywood run (The Woman in the Window, the year before, used the same three stars); Edward G. Robinson, long after Little Caesar made him an icon, gives one of his greatest performances as the humiliatingly decent man who wants only to be loved and to paint. Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea are the femme fatale and the cheap hustler who take him apart. Cheap rooms, forged canvases, and a murder that won’t stay buried: Scarlet Street is noir as moral trap, the American cousin of Lang’s German fatalism.