Review of Scarlet Street (1945) by Ben L — 10 Apr 2015

As I've been watching a number of these older films one of the standout actors has been Edward G. Robinson, and he keeps impressing in Scarlet Street. This is the story of an old bank clerk who is stuck in a depressing marriage and tries to entertain himself by dabbling in painting.

Then, through some miscommunication, a young woman thinks he is a rich artist. She decides to flirt with him and try to get money out of him. Being so happy to have the attention of a young woman he makes all kinds of poor decisions to make her happy.

I'm not 100% sure what the woman was involved in before, she has an abusive boyfriend who is in the picture, encouraging her to continue working on the clerk, so I started to wonder if she was a prostitute and he was her pimp.

None of this is clear, but it's not the most essential information to the story. I like the dark tone of the story, and there were a few moments that genuinely surprised me. However I started to find that none of the characters were really good people.

It became a bit frustrating that there was no one to root for in the story. Edward G. Robinson is the closest we have to a likable protagonist, but as his life starts to crumble, he starts deteriorating quite a bit.

My other big problem was that I found Dan Duryea annoying and hard to watch for more than a couple minutes at a time. A lot of this stuff I'm complaining about was clearly intentional as part of the plot, it just didn't sit well with me, but the end was haunting and worked perfectly.

Scarlet Street is a good film, but not one I'm going to want to watch again.