Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

independent production companies in the forties could not significantly change the way
films were made and they certainly did not enhance his power with the major studios. Joan
Bennett made three noir films for Fritz Lang, 80 however just after Secret Beyond the Door
(1948) - a psychological and melodramatic suspense tale and an updating of Ulmer’s
Bluebeard of 1944 (see p. 334) – Bennett was to quit Diana Productions.
Scarlet Street was based on Jean Renoir’s La Chienne and it shares its bleakness,
though the tone and the way the characters react to each other, under the pressure of
corrupting forces, give the American film a very different emphasis. Moreover, it is the
way that it involves the audience in emotionally strange and improbable ways that makes it
stand out. The film starts in a very simple manner but gradually piles on conflicting
emotions, one after another, to the point that the spectator needs to step back, only to find
him or herself in a weak position to judge. Evaluating right from wrong or the main
character’s actions and attitudes in the film may seem undemanding, yet there comes a
time in the movie that we understand that the right things are done for the wrong reasons
and vice versa. Or that acts committed out of stupidity are sometimes worse than acts of
cruelty, suggesting that an innocent person may be punished for a crime he did not commit
and yet we feel he deserves the punishment anyway. This harsh morality tale presents us
with a world where irony takes on its darkest tinge and underlines the pathos of the main
male character of the film.
Christopher Cross, played by Edward G. Robinson, is depicted as a lonely man, tied
to an unremittingly shrewish wife and an incredibly monotonous job as a bank cashier. At
first, he seems a good-natured man resigned to an everyday life which is as dreary as can
be and this is made visible by the way Cross interacts submissively both at work with his
boss and at home with his wife Adele (Rosalind Ivan). Nonetheless, the viewer begins with
a fellow-feeling for the main character but ends up having little compassion towards the
end of the film, at least as far as his actions are concerned. Soft-spoken, with a fragile
demeanour and incapable of distrust, Cross looks wretched at times and ends in a totally
deplorable state of distress and misfortune.
80 Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window and Secret Beyond the Door.
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