Scarlet Street (1945): Film Noir UK

A box-office hit in its day Scarlet Street (1945) is perhaps legendary director Fritz Lang's finest American film. 

When middle-aged milquetoast Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) rescues street-walking bad girl Kitty (Joan Bennett) from the rain slicked gutters of an eerily artificial back lot of Greenwich Village, he plunges headlong into a whirlpool of lust, larceny and revenge. As Chris' obsession with the irresistibly vulgar Kitty grows, the meek cashier is seduced, corrupted, humiliated and transformed into an avenging monster before implacable fate and perverse justice triumph in the most satisfyingly downbeat denouement in the history of American film. 

Both Scarlet Street producer Walter Wanger's wife and director Lang's mistress, Joan Bennett created a femme fatale icon as the unapologetically erotic and ruthless Kitty. Robinson breathes subtle, fragile humanity into Chris Cross while film noir super-heavy Dan Duryea, as Kitty's pimp boyfriend Johnny, skilfully moulds "a vicious and serpentine creature…