Every picture tells a story

Scarlet Street

(1945)

This disc from a cheap Kino noir collection was up for deaccession, but I'm pulling it off the waiver wire. Fritz Lang directs Edward G. Robinson as a milquetoast (named Chris Cross, really) crushed by the women in his life. Pretty formulaic (and comical in its desperate distortion of what is essentially a pimp-whore relationship between Dan Duryea's oily Johnny Prince and Joan Bennett as Chris's other woman) until the final reel, where Lang twists it beautifully.