|
The opening shot is a marked advancement on The Lodger: The camera cranes up from a street organ, pans across the bustling set, tracks through a second-story window and becomes a POV shot in the middle of a murderous scuffle. A sensitive soul with an aberrant side for the culprit, a struggling London composer (Laird Cregar) given to "black little moods" from which he awakens bewildered and bloodied. Between the fair lady (Faye Marlowe) who encourages classical gentility and the dark minx (Linda Darnell) who milks his talent for tavern ditties, the mind races toward delirium. In the year of Scarlet Street, John Brahm's portrait of the artist as unconscious killer, a cozy period setting marvelously cracked by wild cinematic unbalances. Pipes tumble into a construction ditch and through the wide-angle lens turn into the visualization of a tangled psyche; the protagonist steps out in a trance and splashes a puddle, the ground-level composition freezes and fades to black on a woman's scream. "Police at their ruddy wit's end as usual," except for the Scotland Yard examiner (George Sanders) with an eye for distortions. Deceit sends violins crashing, Guy Fawkes Night is envisioned as a mountain of grimacing effigies that conceals a corpse, Brahm tilts down from the top as this "dickens of a bonfire" is lit. The musician's monstrous frenzies, not the baleful water motifs of the director's Ripper but a full Gothic blaze. "You must hear the concerto to the end," sweeps and swoops that accelerate until it's just the essence of the madman's masterwork filling the screen, a grand piano in an inferno. ("Art is born from what it burns," says Malraux.) Ulmer's Bluebeard is near, in the distance await Sondheim's demon barber and Ferrara's driller killer. Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle. With Glenn Langan and Alan Napier. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |