SCARLET STREET (1945)

Fritz Lang’s SCARLET STREET is classic noir laced with patches of black humor. Retired and retiring bank clerk Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) has a gold watch and little else to show for his 25 years of dutiful service. Unappreciated by his shrewish wife, he falls for an enticing woman named Kitty (Joan Bennett) and leads her to believe he's a wealthy artist, though actually he's only an amateur painter. Kitty's sleazy boyfriend Johnny (Dan Duryea) gets her to maneuver lovesick Cross into setting her up in an apartment (with his wife's money). There, away from dull married life and fueled by his passion for Kitty, he begins to paint masterpieces, which unbeknownst to him, Johnny sells to galleries under Kitty's name. The results are both disastrous and ironic – in other words, totally noirish. Robinson, famous for playing sadistic hoodlums throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s, is fine as the cultured Chris Cross – and beautiful Joan Bennett, who had co-starred with Robinson and Duryea the year before in another noir thriller directed by Lang, THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, makes a fetching femme fatale.