Review of Scarlet Street (1945)
Seen in 2019.
Film noir. The composition is a little clumsy, but I like the ending. Though Lang himself was not raised in the US, the film is a product of the Hollywood studio system and should therefore be expected to express a contemporary Christian moralism. It doesn’t. The script embraces the humanistic conscience, such that murderers suffer from their own deeds even if they are not punished by other people. Granted, this idea is taken to an implausible extreme when Chris becomes homeless and delusional, but it’s still head and shoulders above the ordinary murder yarn, where Yahweh’s hand must be seen to kill the killer or land them in prison as a temporal proxy for Hell.