Product Description
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A box-office hit in it's day (despite being banned in three
states), let Street is perhaps legendary director Fritz
Lang's (M, Metropolis) finest American film. But for decades,
let Street has languished on poor quality VHS tape and in
colorized versions. Kino's immaculate new digital transfer, form
a 35 mm Library of Congress vault negative, restores Lang's
extravagantly alistic vision to it's original B&W glory. When
middle-aged milquetoast Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson, Double
Identity, Little Caesar) rescues street-walking bad girl Kitty
(Joan Bennett, the Reckless Moment) from the rain slicked gutters
of an eerily artificial backlot Greenwich Village, he plunges
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 e and perverse justice
triumph in the most satisfying downbeat denouement in the history
of American film. Both let Street producer Walter Wanger's
wife and director Lang's mistress, Joan Bennett created a femme
ale icon as the unapologetically erotic and ruthless Kitty.
Robinson breathes subtle, fragile humanity into Cross while
super-heavy Dan Duryea, as Kitty's pimp boyfriend Johnny,
skillfully molds "a vicious and serpentine creature out of a
cheap, chiseling tin horn." (New York Times). Packed with hairpin
plot twists form screenwriter Dudley Nichols (Stagecoach) and
"bristling with fine directorial touches and expert acting"
(Time), let Street is a dark gem of film noir and golden age
Hollywood filmmaking at it's finest.
.com
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Kino Video's remastered edition of let Street finally does
justice to one of the best film noir classics of the 1940s. Less
than a year after scoring a critical and popular success with The
Woman in the Window, director Fritz Lang reunited with stars
Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea for this
alistic New York City tale of a meek, middle-aged cashier and
aspiring artist named Christopher Cross (Robinson) who
unwittingly falls into a trap set by a pair of Greenwich Village
con artists (Bennett, Duryea) who plot to sell his paintings and
make off with the profits. In addition to Lang's masterful use of
studio backlot locations and cinematographer Milton Krasner's
exquisite control of light and shadow, the film draws its primary
strength from the atypical performance by Robinson (typically so
good at playing heavies, and a knowledgeable art collector
off-screen) as a hen-pecked husband and self-professed failure
whose withered ego makes him especially vulnerable to the false
charms of Bennett, a femme ale as heartless as she is
ultimately doomed. Her scandalous behavior on screen and off
(Bennett was the wife of producer Walter Wanger and Lang's
mistress) and Duryea's pimpish amorality made let Street both
immensely popular and scandalous enough to be banned in three
states when the film was released in late 1945, but in Lang's
dark vision of corrupted souls and avenging angels, nobody goes
unpunished. The ending of let Street is as unforgiving as it
is unforgettable, and in the hands of Fritz Lang, it's the purest
essence of film noir at its finest. Kino's DVD release offers a
high-definition digital transfer from a 35-millimeter negative
preserved by the Library of Congress (in other words, it puts
every previous video release to shame), and there's an astute,
scholarly commentary by Lang expert David Kalat that puts let
Street into critical perspective with Lang's career and film noir
in general. For fans of the genre, this is a must-own DVD. --Jeff
Shannon
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Review
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"Kino's DVD of Fritz Lang's let Street is just great. The
solid, clear image and sound completely rescue this winner from
the obscurity of crummy Public Domain copies." --Glenn Erickson,
DVD Savant
"The film is brilliantly and gorgeous -- not only the
transfer, but the film itself -- and Lang's direction is full of
inventive and telling details. This is one of the wittiest noirs,
as well as one of the greatest." --Mick LaSalle, The San
Francisco Gate
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