vivahawks wrote:Lang's point is always that there are no genuine "nice guys"; there's just as much capacity for evil and self-destruction inside them as there is inside a guy like Dan Duryea's character, which is why I don't think Chris is an object of condemnation in the way you mean. That presupposes that the audience can view itself on a higher moral level than Chris, but Lang's point is that we're not any better than he is, we just haven't crossed our line yet
Didn't Lang say something like, 'From Scarlet Street on, I was basically trying to prove that the average citizen is no better than a criminal'? You seem to see Lang's intent as being to make his audience
less judgemental and condemnatory (and perhaps to influence their opinions about capital punishment?) - and I guess you could read Scarlet Street as a more extreme version of the cautionary tale presented in Woman in the Window, warning us how easily even the most respectable citizen can be sucked into a life of crime once he lets his guard down.
I'd have no trouble reading WITW that way, but somehow it just doesn't work for Scarlet Street, precisely because, as I said before,
Chris does not suffer from guilt at the end of the film. The deleted scene of him cheering Johnny's death would have emphasised this even more clearly, I think.
In WITW, Robinson has learned his lesson at the end, and knows to stick to his safe, conventional little routines, in which he can remain reasonably happy. The same is not the case for the hero of Scarlet Street: he has no loving wife, no decent job, no exclusive club to go to, and is even threatened (by Adele) with the loss of his paintings. Kitty represents a lifeline, and he attaches himself to her not just on an idle whim, but because he needs to be loved, wanted and respected; he needs it so badly he can even fall for this utterly wretched woman, who from the start is depicted as a selfish, air-headed bitch, and as such bears very little resemblance to the equivalent character in the earlier film.
Chris's agony at the end has nothing to do with any crimes he has committed, but stems simply from the fact that Kitty did not love him after all. I get the impression that what pains him at the end, when he sees the 'self-portrait' being sold, is not that he's lost out on the money, but that he's forced to be confronted with the idealised vision of Kitty to which he is still in thrall - the camera keeps the shot of the painting in full-frame for a long time as it moves towards the car, indicating how much this still dominates Chris's thoughts. (Interesting to compare Legrand in La Chienne - does he not see the painting, or does he just not care?) What is the moral of all this? It isn't, 'no crime goes unpunished', since he isn't punished for the crime, even by his conscience;
it isn't 'don't fall in love with whores', since Chris only does this out of desperation, out of a real
need; it isn't 'don't stick to your comfortable, safe existence', because Chris doesn't have one of those; and so I don't see how the story can work as a sort of 'there but for the grace of God goes you' tale, since it isn't clear what Chris was supposed to do instead of what he did. He wouldn't have been any better off if he'd told Kitty the truth and she'd dumped him, he'd still have been trapped in his lonely, loveless existence.
So the fact that the torture all comes out of himself kind of vitiates the moral point of the story - the distinction davidhare draws between the 'deterministic fatalism' of Lang's earlier work, and the belief that fate emerges out of character which, supposedly, dominates his later work, is interesting. Chris falls because of things in himself, but they're not things he can do anything about, so you have a strange mix of determinism and character-driven tragedy. But since he still effectively has no choice, there cannot be a moral to the story.
I do find Scarlet Street a very affecting film, but the sympathy is in the writing and the acting. I've never seen any evidence, in any Lang film, that he was capable of approaching a story with real compassion or pity - the attitude you're describing, vivahawks, sounds like one of amoral contempt for the human race, not one of 'he who is without sin cast the first stone'-type compassion. And this is why I feel a split reaction to Scarlet Street; it's a masterpiece, like most of Lang's films, but it has no real heart.