SCARLET STREET.
Edward G Robinson & Joan Bennet,
Dan Duryea, Jess Barker, Margaret Lindsay.
Dir: Fritz Lang, 1945, Universal.

SYNOPSIS:
A glum, dark film with Eddy Robinson sulking the way only he can. He plays an uncontrollable bastard who stops at nothing to get what he wants. Like most Fritz Lang flicks, it's a cut above the usual Hollywood trash.

"The film was of little interest to Robinson, who counted the days until it was over, but it was a film with touches that aroused the censors, and had the effect of adding a new sexual facet to Little Caesar. They protested about a scene in which Robinson paints Bennet's toenails as she lounged in a negligee. The board of censors disliked the scene in which Robinson's character climbs a telephone pole to hear the high voltage hum of the electric chair to which a man he has framed for the murder of Bennet has been condemned; and the censors insisted that six of the seven ice-pick stabs employed by Robinosn to kill Bennet be cut from the final prints."
- Alan Gansberg, E G Robinson biographer.

REVIEWS:
"The director unerringly chooses the right sound and image to assault the spectator's sensibilities."
- C A Lejeune.
"Daring but rather gloomy Hollywood melodrama, the first in which a crime went unpunished (though the culprit was shown suffering remorse). Interesting and heavily Teutonic, but as entertainment not a patch on the similar but lighter Woman in the Window, which the same team had made a year previously."
- Leslie Halliwell.