Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
Scarlet Street
A meek cashier paints on Sundays. A couple decides to collect him.
Fritz Lang's cruelest American film: Edward G. Robinson as a man whose one private beauty — his painting — is taken from him along with everything else. The scam is small; the annihilation is total. Censor boards banned it for letting a crime go formally unpunished, missing that the last reel is nothing but punishment, walking. Lang shoots New York interiors like Weimar stage sets: every room a trap that thinks it's a home.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Fritz Lang
- Photographed by
- Milton Krasner
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Fritz Lang, twice: the city as a machine that consumes its workers, then the city as a set of small rooms that do the same job more quietly. The architecture shrank; the trap didn't.