A Film Canon

The second of Lang's great dream-noirs, Scarlet Street is effectively an alternative version of The Woman In The Window, relocating the shadowy world between painting and window to the painting itself, and so producing an infinite recession, or reticulation, that is eventually identified with a particularly oppressive noir aesthetic, as articulated in the works of cashier - and amateur painter - Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson). These are almost invariably cityscapes, indefinably masculine (according to an art critic) and possessed of "a certain peculiar something, but not perspective" (according to a fellow artist). Accordingly, Lang replaces the grid-like detachment of Renoir's original with a more diagonally-inflected claustrophobia, while replacing the amorality that it enabled with the requisite amount of guilt for the first criminal to go unpunished on American screens, mainly by virtue of a postscript that is virtually absent from La Chienne, completes the gradual fusion of cinematic and painterly registers, and confirms that the pervasive dichotomy between banal, domestic spaces and liberating, artistic spaces (specifically, the apartment of a former graphic designer that Cross does up as a studio; generally, the semi-pastoral Greenwich Village surrounds) has been an illusory one. That said, Renoir's vision of emasculation remains, largely by virtue of Joan Bennett's compelling portrayal of the woman who seduces Cross into handing over his money and, eventually, his signature; the least likeable, or charismatic, femme fatale, whose apparent ability to offer sympathy despite her agenda is completely demystified by her final, iconic tirade - "I've been waiting to laugh in your face ever since I met you!" - ensuring that Robinson's peculiarly asexual screen persona - or, rather, its profound sexual dyslexia - achieves its pathetic apotheosis.