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Tie-ins to "Woman In The Window"?


I'm wondering what the connections were to these two films, with the same cast and similar plots, one year apart.

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Same director, same production company, too. Florence Jacobowitz wrote an essay on both of them arguing that film noir is "The Man's Melodrama." Fritz Lang, Joan Bennett and Walter Wanger formed a company called Diana Productions, whose first film release was Scarlet Street. They believed, and Lang in particular championed the notion, that intelligent audience participation and collaboration were not only desirable but nearly essential, and set out to produce films for a "mature, adult audience."

The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street foreground and place the narrative's relationship to social determinants through various stylistic strategies. They speficially rely upon narrative devices such as irony, humour, parody, and excessive, heightend modes of dramatisation, as well as the performances of their principal stars, to produce a qualified engagement with the protagonists and the story. The audience is privileged to various levels of awareness and a kind of multiple layering is achieved whereby the spectator can profoundly feel for and identify with a protagonist's predicament or the conditions within which she/he finds her/himself or the tone and the atmospher underlying those conditions, but can see beyond the characters' limited points-of-view to the social contradictions which shape their desires.


-From Jacobowitz, Florence. The Man's Melodrama. In Ian Cameron, "The Book of Film Noir." Continuum Intl Pub Group. 1994.

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Thanks for the info.


http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index.jsp?cid=186977

The Truth is out there.

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