“ONE OF THE 25 GREATEST NOIRS OF ALL TIME! Deeply perverse, and immensely enjoyable for the ways writer Dudley Nichols and Fritz Lang run circles around the Production Code.” – Eddie Muller, host of TCM’s Noir Alley

A psychologically complex melodrama written in glistening black-and-white, SCARLET STREET finds one of cinema’s great poets of doom at his fatalistic peak. Having struck gold with 1944’s The Woman in the Window, Lang reassembled that film’s dynamite leads, Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea, again the following year for SCARLET STREET. The quartet knocked another one out of the park, producing a film noir so potent it was banned in Atlanta, Milwaukee, and the entire state of New York. Robinson stars as Chris Cross, a lonely and unhappily married clerk who falls for a brassy prostitute (Bennett), not realizing that she’s in love with her pimp (Duryea) and that the pair are milking him for whatever cash he can earn or steal. The atmosphere is thick with all the guilt, paranoia, and cynicism you’d expect from the man who gave us M, and it all leads toward one of the most nightmarish dénouements in noir history.

This film is screening as part of Arkadin’s NOIRVEMBER series, $3 Sunday matinees of film noir classics that spotlight the broken dreams and bitter paranoia of this distinctly American genre.