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

Question: Scarlet Street had the same trio of stars as The Woman in the Window:
Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson and Dan Duryea. Did you have censorship
problems with the movie because Duryea, who had been conning Robinson, with
Bennett’s help, goes to the chair for killing her – when in reality Robinson did it?
Fritz Lang’s answer: The studio worried about that, but I pointed out that Robinson
is punished more by living with his guilt than he would have been by going to jail.
At the end of the film he is a man driven by the Furies, at his wit’s end. Interestingly
enough, not one review complained that an innocent man had to go to the chair for a
crime he did not commit. But the reason that no one commented on it is possibly not
because they were aware that he had done a lot of other things that would have
justified his death, but because they simply did not like the character. If this is so one
wonders if the morals of the average moviegoer have eroded over the years.
(Server & Gorman 1998:25)
Scarlet Street implies, for example, as strongly as possible under the Production
Code, that Johnny was a pimp with whom Kitty argues over money. Moreover, in a cut
scene, Chris was to have witnessed the execution of his rival, but instead, dismissed for
embezzlement, he becomes a blundering tramp. In the case of The Woman in the Window,
the ending was also changed from the film’s source novel to comply with the Code and
with it the “Crime Does Not Pay” principle and its issues of sexual misconduct that the
film portrays. In an intelligent slow track back from his flabby body, the camera reveals
that these events happened in fantasy when Wanley had inoffensively fallen asleep in the
overstuffed chair at his club. The movie is indeed filled with all types of Freudian
psychological readings about sexual tensions and repressions. In the first scenes, Wanley,
in his role of a college teacher, is lecturing students about psychoanalytical concepts that to
a certain extent represent his own repressed desires to demonstrate his manhood (when
contemplating the painting in the window, for example, he turns to Alice and asks her
whether this was aptly heterosexual: “Did I react properly, ah, normally?”).
Through the dark camera shots and angles cinematographer Milton Krasner
manages in both films to add to the tension in Robinson’s internal struggles. Moreover, the
multifaceted mise-en-scène of clocks, mirrors, paintings and windows, as seen above, also
help to convey the hysterical fatefulness of the main protagonist in both films. But, more
importantly, the complex journey Chris Cross experiences with his unstable identity
throughout Scarlet Street appears to be the one that Fritz Lang had set for himself and
simultaneously for the viewer, ascribing thus much of the underlying power of his film
style.
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