Scarlet Street
1945 · 101 min · Drama · Crime
Scarlet Street (1945), Fritz Lang's noir with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, banned by three city censors. Watch the full movie free, no account.
Edward G. Robinson is a meek cashier who paints on Sundays, Joan Bennett is the woman he thinks needs rescuing, and Dan Duryea is the man she is actually loyal to. Lang had used all three the year before in The Woman in the Window, and here he lets the trap close properly.
It is a remake of Renoir's La Chienne, and it was the first film out of Diana Productions, the company Lang set up with Bennett and her husband Walter Wanger. The Breen office passed it. Then the censors in New York, Milwaukee and Atlanta banned it outright in early 1946, because the killing goes unpunished by any court.
Lang's reply was that nobody who watched it would want the life he had put on screen.
This film has an audio description track, written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. There is nothing to switch on — the description is in the film’s own sound, so pressing play is the whole of it.
We describe films like this for archives and filmmakers: see what audio description costs and audio description for independent films.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
Is Scarlet Street public domain? The rights evidence — the copyright registration, the renewal search and the sources we checked, written out in full so you can check them too.
Watch it here
This is our restoration, with the audio description track mixed in. There is nothing to switch on: press play and the description is in the sound. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is counted.
Sound only — 198 MB rather than 1.6 GB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
Or watch it with the picture:
The same film without description, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Every film here that carries audio description — what description is, who it is for, and how ours are made.
How this print was restored
This copy of Scarlet Street was restored here, from a print that had been through a good deal before it reached us. The work finished on 2026-10-01. Every step is listed below, because a re-encode passed off as a restoration is worth nothing and the only way to tell them apart is to say what was done.
- 327 described cues across a 101 minute 32 second runtime, filling 24 minutes of gaps between dialogue -- 23.7 percent of the film -- at 162 words per minute.
- Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.
- The original soundtrack was repaired from the Archive copy: rumble filtered below 60 Hz, the top end rolled off above 4 kHz, loudness matched in two passes.
- Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.
- Captioned verbatim: 1,124 cues, every disputed line ruled by Mike.
The print we started from is here, so the before and after can be compared.
More like this: Free mystery and crime films, Free drama films.