There are two Fritz Lang films I would like to discuss. One is The Woman in the Window, the other Scarlet Street. These two films are interesting because they both share three essential cast members, have a lot of the same themes and images, and were produced one year apart, The Woman in the Window in 1944 and Scarlet Street the following year, 1945.
Both films idealise the female image through paintings, but also demonizes them. In both films, the protagonist (played by Edward G. Robinson) falls in love with a mysterious and beautiful woman (played by Joan Bennett). Both times, the love interest is portrayed through painting, but in the reality of the film turns out to be the downfall of the protagonist, a lure or lust that sends him towards a downward spiral. In The Woman in the Window, the protagonist is fascinated by a painting of a woman in a window. She appears to him in real life and takes him with her home. There, one of her lovers enters and in jealous rage attacks the protagonist has to kill him to defend himself. The rest of the film concerns itself with detailing the police trying to figure out the murder.
In Scarlet Street, the protagonist who is suffering from loneliness sees a woman being hit on the street. He hits attacker and thinks he saved her. The attacker runs away. It turns out later that the attacker was her boyfriend, and they have a strong love/hate relationship, it becomes apparent that the Joan Bennett character is masochistic. The protagonist grows closer to the woman of his desire, and as a bank clerk starts stealing money to support her, although she and her boyfriend, Johnny, are just using him. Although the painting theme does not become apparent immediately, the protagonist is an amateur painter, and this grows in more significance throughout the film.
Let’s look at these two frames from the beginning of The Woman in the Window. The first one, we see Robinson’s character admiring the painting in the window. In the next, we see Joan Bennett’s character, the person the painting is painted from in the reflection.
What the second shot does is that it shows us the “idealised” version contra to the “real” version of the woman. Both are fascinating, but the picture is idealised, while the real thing is demonic. The film shows us clearly men’s fascination and attraction to the idealised picture of woman, but throughout the narrative shows that this fascination can lead to dangerous places. This next frame is taken from the woman’s apartment; notice the drawings of women to the left and the sculpture of the female body to the right.
Again, art which idealises the female image, now look at this shot.
The dark figure of Joan Bennett is much more foreboding, and soon after this shot, the former lover bursts in and the protagonist has to commit murder and hide from the police. Literally, because of the female’s aggressive sexuality, he is plunged into despair. However, these ideas are even more apparent and profound in Scarlet Street.
Scarlet Street is very much about double images and deceit. Every major character is lying about his or her character, sometimes on several levels. There’s the protagonist who is a bank clerk, but he is also an amateur painter. He lies, however, to the female character Kitty, and says he is a professional painter. She, on the other hand lies to him about her past and relationship with Johnny. Later, when the amateur paintings made by the protagonist are discovered by an art critic, Kitty pretends that it was she who painted them. Later in the film the protagonist paints her picture, and it is called “Self Portrait”.
There are more of these painting/real life images. The protagonist lives with his nagging widow, who before marrying him was married to a police officer who died, whom she idealises. His picture hangs proudly on the wall.
However, later it turns out that he never died, but rather faked death to escape his wife, and he is a real charlatan who blackmails people. Compare the painting to the real person.
In both films Joan Bennett’s characters have very aggressive sexuality, enticing and snaring Robinson’s characters. In The Woman in the Window she isn’t really a bad person, she just is a woman, but in noir women tend to be dangerous just because of their sexuality. Films like Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) and White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949) are good examples of this trend. In Scarlet Street the character is more demonic though, Kitty constantly exploits and uses the protagonist for his money. Look at these two frames, in the first she isn’t really aware of the fact that she can use him, in the second she is very aware. Dangerous sexuality indeed.
But in essence, both films pose female sexuality as enticing and dangerous to men, and in both films the male protagonist ends tormented. In The Woman in the Window because of the situation she has dragged him into, and in Scarlet Street he is tormented after learning she was trying to con him, and realizes that her liking him was just an illusion, just like his paintings.
Some might claim that these films are womanising or anti-feminism, but I don’t think so. I think it is rather cautionary, the idealised image of females is an illusion, and too strong a fascination with this image could be dangerous. And indeed, the idealisation of the female image had never been stronger than in that of Hollywood cinema, in many ways these films are reflections of this trend in Hollywood, and in the progress denouncing this image as a false illusion. In the final images of Scarlet Street we see the protagonist, now tormented and poor, walk past a painting store. There he sees the picture he painted of the woman he loved sold off, it called a masterpiece by the young lady artist. I think this scene really shows the extent of how the illusion can cause pain and suffering.
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