Third rate dialog and studio system casting doomed this project before it ever could get off the ground. Sultry Lauren Bacall or tempting Gloria Graham would have been highly preferable to Joan Bennett but even her casting made more sense than Dan Duryea as her pimp boyfriend. To say he is no Richard Widmark or Lee Marvin is an understatement. I expected him to take off his white hat and start singing and dancing every moment he appeared on the screen. The contrived appearance of a previously presumed dead character, wearing a pirate's eye-patch as a disguise, would have made more sense in an Ed Wood's Jailbait than in a film by the great Fritz Lang. The eye-patch as a disguise and his story of ending up on a banana boat to Honduras made as much sense as Victor Lazlo eluding the Nazis in a yellow suit in Ted Turner's colorized version of Casablanca. All of this is unfortunate because Fritz Lang was still capable of making great films as shown with The Big Heat a few years later. The basic premise of the love of a young woman ruining an older man (e.g. The Blue Angel) could have resulted in a worthy film.
Review of Scarlet Street
