1945 / 102 min / b/w
Dir. Fritz Lang / Scr. Dudley Nichols
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea
Adapted from: La Chienne (1930) by Georges de la Fouchardière
Paris release: Jan. 29, 1947
35mm print courtesy of the Library of Congress
This screening was part of The Inaugural Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Paris 1946 and American Film Noir
Programmed by Rob King, Film and Media Studies
"Fritz Lang has never, during the course of his American career, been a director of the strange. A specialist, just before the war, in well-crafted social drama (Fury, You Only Live Once), he was and still is extremely foreign to the new atmosphere. […] [Scarlet Street] is a remake of the Renoir movie La Chienne, which had blazed the trail in 1931 for French realism. Never uninteresting, although more might have been expected of its creator, the work is mainly memorable for its fascinating orchestration of remorse. The murderer of a woman who’d rejected him, Edward G. Robinson wanders through the town, haunted by the voice of his victim, who endlessly repeats the name of the man she loved and who Robinson has just let be condemned in his place. Censorship has been at work and we haven’t seen the best scene: the killer, perched on a post carrying electric cables, listening with delight to the buzzing of the current that’s going to electrocute the innocent love. We’ve been deprived of an exemplary sequence here."
– Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, Panorama du film noir américain, 1941-1953
About the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival
Paris 1946. The war is over and American films are once again in Parisian theaters. The French immediately notice a shift in the sensibility of Hollywood’s crime films. They call it noir.
This festival—the first in a ten-year series devoted to the legacy of film noir—returns us to that pivotal moment in film history some seven decades ago. For its inaugural year, the Kit Film Noir Festival will present eight of the films that screened in France that season and inspired the label film noir. Most films will be shown in 35mm.
This festival was funded by a generous gift from alumnus Gordon Kit (Columbia College ’76), in honor of his parents.
For more information, contact filmnoir@columbia.edu