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SPOILER ALERT!
In 1984, I bought a videocassette recorder. No longer was my desire to watch a movie limited to (a) new releases at a movie theater, (b) movies that showed up later at the drive-in, and (c) movies that were broadcast on television. Now I could walk into a video store where I could rent a movie when I wanted to see it, and not when fate should let it cross my path.
As a result, I began to take an interest in film theory, for now I could read about movies in books and then rent the movies the authors discussed. One book I came across, published in 1981, was Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, by Foster Hirsch. I had seen many films noirs prior to buying this book but did not realize I was doing so. But then, according to Hirsch, the directors of those movies did not know they were making films noirs either, until the French critics came up with the term.
Right off the bat, Hirsch presented two movies that he regarded as the most famous of this genre, Double Indemnity (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). From my limited perspective, I had my doubts about that. I had seen Double Indemnity a couple of times on television, but I had never even heard of Scarlet Street. And whereas the former was available for rent at the video store, the latter was not. As a result, it was a few years before I was finally able to see it.
In any event, Hirsch gives his reason for picking these two movies as paradigmatic of film noir:
In theme, characterization, world view, settings, direction, performance, and writing, the two dramas are focal points for noir style, as representative of the genre as Stagecoach is of westerns or Singing in the Rain of musicals.
In particular, he says these two movies are about “doomed characters who become obsessed with bewitching women.” However, there is one theme they do not share, and that is masochism, which is present only in Scarlet Street. In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) comes across as a smooth talker who is used to having a fair amount of success with women. As for Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), no man would even think about trying to push her around.
But in Scarlet Street, Christopher “Chris” Cross (Edward G. Robinson) is easily manipulated by Katherine “Kitty” March (Joan Bennett), who enjoys humiliating him. Chris is literally a Sunday painter, though Kitty thinks he is a professional artist who gets a lot of money for his paintings. At one point, when Chris says he wants to paint her, she hands him some nail polish and then presents him with her bare foot, wiggling her toes, saying, “Paint me, Chris.” As he kneels down to paint her toenails, she says, “They’ll be masterpieces.”
Kitty allows Chris to hold her foot, for which he is grateful. This is to be contrasted with the foot of her roommate Millie, which has a different significance. Millie has been modeling girdles, and when she comes home, she rubs her back and says she aches. Then she sits down, removes her shoe, and rubs her foot. When two attractive women in a movie are friends, the one that indicates that her feet hurt thereby has her sex appeal diminished. In Red-Headed Woman (1932), Jean Harlow and Una Merkel are friends. Although Merkel is an attractive woman in her own right, when she sits down, removes her shoe, and starts rubbing her foot, we know, as if we didn’t already know, that Harlow is the sexier of the two. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), when Jane Russell says to the manager of a hotel, “Show me a place to take my shoes off,” Marilyn Monroe reprimands her, saying, “A lady never admits her feet hurt.” This reinforces the fact that, though Russell is a beautiful woman, yet Monroe is the sexier of the two. Therefore, when Millie lets us know about her aches and pains, her sore foot in particular, we know that Kitty is the sexy one.
The reason is clear. When a man looks at a woman, he likes to imagine that it is as pleasurable for her to be beautiful for him as it is pleasurable for him to appreciate her beauty. But the minute she indicates that she is uncomfortable in any way, the effect is spoiled, ruining the man’s pleasure. And this is especially true if she says her feet hurt.
Returning to the subject of Chris’s humiliation, we find that things are not much better for him at home. His wife Adele continually compares him unfavorably to her previous husband, Detective Sergeant Homer Higgens, whose large portrait hangs on the wall. He (supposedly) died heroically trying to save a woman from drowning. Although Chris has to work six days a week, we see him wearing an apron, doing the dishes, while Adele plays solitaire. He tells Kitty that he only married Adele because he was lonely, although one suspects he would love to have his solitude back, agreeing with that fellow in The Lusty Men (1952) who says to Robert Mitchum, marriage is lonely, it just isn’t private.
Adele makes Chris do his painting in the bathroom. She despises his paintings, which she thinks are crazy, saying, “Next thing you’ll be painting women without clothes!”
“I never saw a woman without any clothes,” he replies.
“I should hope not!”
Well, we never thought they had much of a sex life, but this confirms it. What little sex there is probably takes place with the lights off and their pajamas on.
When Chris confesses to Kitty that he is married, that gives her an excuse not to have sex with him. She says she is not the type to run around with a married man, while at the same time indicating that she is starting to fall in love with him. So, holding her foot is all the intimacy she allows him.
But whereas Chris’s masochistic subservience to women is psychological, Kitty’s masochism is physical. She has a boyfriend, Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea). She likes the way he slaps her around. In fact, Chris met Kitty the night he saw Johnny knock her down and start kicking her. Chris came to her “rescue,” causing Johnny to lose his balance and hit his head on the curb. When Chris ran to get a policeman, Johnny took off. Kitty let Chris think he was her hero.
Unlike Johnny, Chris is nice to her, which is why she has no respect for him. “If he were mean or vicious or bawled me out or something,” she says, “I’d like him better.” At one point, in an argument she is having with her roommate Millie, Kitty tells her, “You wouldn’t know love if it hit you in the face.”
“If that’s where it hits you,” Millie says right back, “you ought to know!”
At another time, Johnny is telling Kitty and Millie about how it is with men like him, in the movies as well as in real life: “Why I hear of movie actors getting 5,000, …, 10,000 a week. For what? Acting tough, for pushing girls in the face. What do they do I can’t do?”
Johnny is obviously referring to The Public Enemy (1931), where Tom Powers (James Cagney) pushes a grapefruit in the face of another Kitty (Mae Clarke). But it is actually the movies Duryea himself played in that really exemplify Johnny’s point. In Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, Eddie Muller says that Duryea “developed an odd, almost fetishistic on-screen forte—beating women.” It started with Woman in the Window (1944), where he slapped Joan Bennett there too. Muller goes on to describe how Duryea slapped women in Too Late for Tears, Manhandled, Criss Cross, and Johnny Stool Pigeon, all made in 1949. Muller says that as a result, Duryea started getting lots of fan mail from “infatuated females.”
Why does a woman stay with a man that beats her? Because Nature wants babies, and Nature doesn’t give a damn about her happiness. If a woman stays with a man that abuses her, she can still have his babies. She may be miserable, but Nature doesn’t care. Likewise, if a man allows a woman to belittle him and humiliate him, there is always the chance that by allowing himself to be treated that way, she will end up having his baby. The pain, be it physical or psychological, is at first something to be endured for the sake of sex. But eventually, the pain itself becomes erotic, imbued with the promise of sex, thus further cementing the sexual bond so that Nature can get the babies she requires.
We cannot imagine Walter Neff in Double Indemnity allowing a woman to humiliate him because Fred MacMurray is handsome. But Chris, on the other hand, being played by Edward G. Robinson, is supposed to be ugly. Toward the end of the movie, when Chris tries to forgive Kitty after having seen her kissing Johnny, she puts her face in her pillow, making muffled sounds that Chris interprets as crying. “I’m not crying, you fool,” she says to him, rising up in the bed. “I’m laughing! Oh, you idiot! How can a man be so dumb? I’ve wanted to laugh in your face ever since I first met you. You’re old and ugly, and I’m sick of you.” Those hateful words prove too much for Chris, and, happening by chance to be holding an icepick in his hand, he stabs her repeatedly.
But that happens near the end of the movie. When the movie begins, a banquet is being held in honor of Chris’s twenty-five years of faithful service as a cashier in a company owned by J.J. Hogarth. He is played by Russell Hicks, an actor with a distinguished appearance, who was fifty years old at the time. When his chauffeur arrives and informs him that the beautiful woman with whom he is to have a night on the town has arrived in his limousine, he apologizes to his employees for having to leave the party, saying, “You can’t keep a woman waiting, can you?” But before he leaves, he presents Chris with a 14-karat, 17-jewel pocket watch, with an inscription that not only mentions the years of service, but also refers to Chris as a friend. And again, in shaking hands with Chris before he departs, Hogarth refers to him as an “old friend.”
This makes it all the more painful later in the movie when Hogarth discovers that Chris has been stealing money from him. Chris has been using the money to pay for Kitty’s studio apartment and to supply her with luxuries, trying to keep her from finding out he is just a cashier instead of a famous painter. Hogarth tells the police that he cannot bring himself to press charges and dismisses them. After they leave, he turns to Chris and asks, “Chris, it was a woman, wasn’t it?” Chris, unable even to look at Hogarth, nods his head. In a way, Hogarth is being kind and understanding. But in another sense, unintended by Hogarth, it is a cruel form of pity. The wealthy, handsome, and distinguished J.J. Hogarth, who is able to have beautiful women on his own terms, feels sorry for Chris, as he realizes what it must be like for an unattractive man to fall under the spell of the first pretty girl that has ever paid any attention to him.
The beautiful woman that is waiting in the limousine for Hogarth at the beginning of the movie gives a coin to an organ grinder’s monkey, prefiguring the relation Chris will have with Kitty. Chris says to a fellow employee after they leave the banquet, referring to that woman, “I wonder what it’s like to be loved by a young girl like that. You know, nobody ever looked at me like that, not even when I was young.”
Although Robinson is not handsome, of course, I would never on my own have said he was ugly. However, Scarlet Street is a remake of a French film by Jean Renoir, La Chienne (1931). And in that movie, the character that corresponds to Chris is played by Michel Simon, who is even more unattractive, to put it mildly, than Robinson. We don’t need the woman that corresponds to Kitty to tell us that she thinks he is ugly. We know she does.
But maybe I think that way because before I saw La Chienne, I saw another film by Renoir, Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), also starring Michel Simon. I suppose you could call that movie a comedy, provided your idea of what is funny is someone behaving in an atrocious manner, while those around him keep letting him get away with it. The title character, played by Simon, is saved from drowning (attempted suicide), and he is taken into the home of the bookseller who saved him. Boudo then proceeds to deliberately wreck everything he comes into contact with, while exhibiting revolting mannerisms. Thirty minutes into the film, you’ll wish the bookseller had let him drown. Forty minutes in, and you’ll be ready to hold his head under the water until he quits struggling. The bookseller’s wife is a sourpuss, so Boudu rapes her and puts a smile on her face. I felt like a sourpuss watching that movie, and I felt violated by it. But unlike the wife, I did not smile. Boudu’s ugliness is as much a matter of his disgusting personality as it is the physical appearance of Michel Simon who plays that character.
In La Chienne, it is explicitly stated that the woman that corresponds to Kitty is a prostitute, and that the man that corresponds to Johnny is a procurer. That must have been too much to get past the Production Code in the making of Scarlet Street because Kitty is merely portrayed as a woman not averse to using sex to get money from men, with Johnny encouraging her to do so.
Speaking of the Production Code, Muller points out that the movie was controversial when it was released, even though it managed to be approved. He says that some markets for this movie reduced the number of times Chris stabbed Kitty with the icepick from seven times to four times or even only one. The only versions I’ve seen show him stabbing her four times.
Furthermore, Johnny is accused of being the one who killed Kitty. After he found her dead body, he grabbed her jewelry and took off. When captured and confronted by the police with the fact that he had stolen her jewelry, he replied, “But why wouldn’t I? She didn’t have any more use for it, did she?” As a result, he is convicted and executed in the electric chair. But while, strictly speaking, an innocent man is executed for a crime he didn’t commit, Johnny’s character is so despicable that he seems to be getting what he deserves anyway.
As for Chris, the real killer, while not being officially punished, is punished nevertheless. After Chris set Kitty up in her own studio apartment, he brought his paintings over there to keep Adele from throwing them out, as she threatened to do. Johnny tries to sell them himself, still believing as does Kitty that Chris is a famous artist who is paid a lot of money for his paintings. When a famous art critic, Damon Janeway, sees the paintings for sale on a street in Greenwich Village, he thinks they are great and wants to meet the artist. Johnny tells him that the artist is Kitty. Soon her work is displayed in an art store owned by a Mr. Dellarowe, and Kitty is celebrated and admired for her work.
When Chris finds out that she has sold his paintings and has become famous as a result, he is not angry. As he explains to her, “If I’d brought those pictures to a man like Dellarowe, he wouldn’t have taken them. I’m a failure, Kitty.” I guess the idea is that if being a failure is part of a man’s essence, then he cannot succeed no matter how talented he is. Or maybe the difference is that Chris is an ugly man, whereas Kitty is a beautiful woman, with whom Janeway seems to be falling in love. Chris says he and Kitty will go on letting others think she is the artist. Now she lets him paint her for real, her portrait this time, and not her toenails. He says they will call the painting “Self Portrait.”
After Chris is caught embezzling, he loses his job. In his imagination, he can hear Kitty telling Johnny she loves him, and Johnny affectionately calling her “Lazy Legs.” He tries to commit suicide but is prevented from doing so, and soon ends up living on the street. He tries to confess to his crime, but no one believes him since he is now just a bum. The police find him sleeping on a bench and tell him to go to the Bowery where he belongs. He walks down the street. It is Christmas Eve, and we hear “O Come, All Ye Faithful” being played in the background. Surely this portends some kind of redemption for poor Chris.
But then the music goes sour as he sees the Kitty’s “Self Portrait” being removed from Dellarowe’s, having been purchased by a woman for $10,000. It is the masterpiece he can never claim as his own, the portrait of the woman he still loves but can never have.