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

the large birdcage. Looming in the foreground of their living-room, it separates husband
and wife, and keeps the husband timidly at the edge of the frame, holding in one hand his
paint brushes as the mode of escape into the fantasy world of his paintings.
Figure 74. The Woman in the Window Figure 75. Scarlet Street
Christopher starts writing Kitty some openly emotional love letters which Johnny,
her boyfriend from the street scene described above, discovers. Kitty and Johnny have an
abusive relationship: he beats her up and calls her stupid names, like “Lazy Legs” but she
does not seem to pay much attention to this; on the contrary, she still sees him as her great
lover and her fiancé. Johnny’s fusion of aggression, off-hardness and brusque affection is
masochistically accepted by Kitty. She knows that her boyfriend is a sadistic criminal who
slaps her around. She at one point complains to her working girlfriend colleague, Millie
(Margaret Lindsay): “You wouldn’t know love if it hit you in the face” to which her
colleague replies: “If that’s where it hits you – you ought to know.” In turn, Johnny has no
problem in pimping her out to Chris Cross in an effort to gain advantage and extort from
him all his money: “I expect you to use your brain… Here I am, knockin’ my brains out,
tryin’ to raise a little capital, and this is right here in your lap… Date him up!”
Like La Chienne (published in the United States as Poor Sap by Alfred Knopf in
1930), Scarlet Street depicts many crime scenes involving disreputable characters and an
antihero that manages to escape from his crime. However, whereas in La Chienne the
submissive antihero is visibly sleeping with the streetwalker, in Scarlet Street this
illegitimate affair is presented to us with greater obscurity, as it attempts to finesse a
clearly sexual relationship. The Production Code did not have to bar these implied sex
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