Scarlet Street (1945)

 Fritz Lang's "Scarlet Street"

Both Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang developed a screen version of the 1931 French novel La Chienne. However, rather than doing an exact remake of Renoir's film, Lang instead took a different approach. The social climate during these two films are probably the reason for their differing perspectives. However, it is also because Renoir and Lang both had different intentions with the source material.

Lang's adaptation, called Scarlett Street, is basically the same plot. An amateur painter and cashier, Christopher Cross, falls in love with a woman with money issues, Kitty March. He buys her an apartment so she can keep afloat while he uses it for an art studio. Little does Cross know that Kitty and her boyfriend, Johnny, are taking advantage of him. Kitty continuously asks him for money so that she can give to Johnny. In order to accomplish this, Christopher steals money from the bank he works at. They also take his art and sell it to a high end art director, passing it off as Kitty's work. When Christopher eventually finds out he's been duped, he kills Kitty. Johnny gets blamed for the murder and is sent to the electric chair. Christopher becomes a jobless bum wandering the streets of New York haunted by the two people whose death he is responsible for. 

Like Renoir's La Chienne, Lang's Scarlett Street has the basic same plot beats. However, with his film, Renoir is more concerned about the macrostructure forcing the characters to behave in the manner they do. He does this by taking intentionality away from the characters. They appear to make the decisions they make out of necessity. They financially leach off of others, which provides them with no real human connection to other people. This forces them to behave off of their need for human connection - only to find out that they've been used for financial gain. It is in this way that their actions appear indirect. They are merely acting out based on their external situations. This detaches the viewer from the characters internally, as they only seem to be a product of their structure - a structure that determines their ultimate destiny. Renoir uses mise-en-scene to entrap the characters in a physical realm, thus calling our attention to the external macro-structure. In this way, Renoir is more concerned about the 'society' of it all. This was very important in 1931 when Renoir made the film, as a global depression was weighing on society after the economic collapse of 1929. This social and economic climate created Renoir's need to criticize the capitalist structure that was plaguing humanity. So, with La Chienne, Renoir created a film that forced the viewer to zoom out from the characters to view their corrupted structure, turning them into prostitutes who cannot have any sort of human connection outside of being parasites of each other. 

Lang's version of the story chooses to focus more internally. To do this, Lang gives the characters intentionality. The decisions they make occur because they want them to for their own individualistic desires. Cross becomes blinded by love because of his utter loneliness. Kitty, or as Johnny calls her, 'Lazy-Legs,' steals from Cross because she is lazy - she is too lazy to go find work and shares an apartment with her friend, and even dirties up that apartment because she's too lazy to pick up or clean up after herself. Johnny, on the other hand, needs to fund shady business deals, so he takes from Kitty and abuses her. These individual motivations by the characters draws the viewer to the internal, zooming us in rather than zooming us out to the societal mechanisms. The characters' desires and abhorrent behavior allows Lang to focus more on the human soul. The greed, laziness, and pitifulness by the characters creates an immoral set of behaviors. With this, Lang demonstrates how black the human soul is, and how low each of us will go to satiate our own pitiful desires. This focus more on the inward darkness of humanity was a product of its time, like Renoir's version. The film came out in 1945, at the tail end of World War II. Many films being made at that time focused on the dark elements of humanity and the depravity of what human beings are capable of. This also was a point of thematic linkage for Lang, as many of the films in his oeuvre dealt with the utter corruption of one's morals. 

Both films were astounding works of art. And it just goes to show how utterly masterful each director was, in that both were able to take the same exact story and turn them into totally different perspectives. Lang's perspective was a look at how perverse we as individuals are, and how we will behave completely immoral for our own personal gain. Because of the incredibly dark perspective of the film, the New York Censor Board banned the film entirely, stating that the film was, "obscene, indecent, immoral, inhuman, and sacrilege." In a chain reaction, the film then became banned in Milwaukee and Atlanta, stating that it was because of "the sordid life it portrayed, the treatment of illicit love, the failure of the characters to receive orthodox punishment from the police, and because the picture would tend to weaken a respect for law." It was considered by these censor boards overall to be, "licentious, profane, obscure and contrary to the good order of the community." Despite these marks against the film by censors, the film was well received and earned $2.5 million in the U.S. Film historians look to Scarlett Street as a worthwhile adaptation that provides a new perspective on a known story.