Kino Lorber has released a 4K UHD edition of Fritz Lang’s 1945 film Scarlet Street that is worth seeking out.

Released on Christmas Day 1945 in Baltimore, Maryland, Lang’s film noir masterpiece was banned by the New York, Milwaukee, and Atlanta censors for being “licentious, profane, obscure, and contrary to the good order of the community.” Its Los Angeles release did not occur until January 1946, making it ineligible for the 1945 Golden Globes and Academy Awards. Cleared by the censors after minor changes were made to the film, it finally opened in New York on Valentine’s Day 1946 where it would be eligible for 1946 awards consideration by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review in addition to its eligibility for that year’s Golden Globes and Academy Awards.

A huge hit with the public, Lang’s follow-up to the previous year’s The Woman in the Window, with the same three stars, Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea, pleased some critics, but not all. A nominee for Best Feature Film at the 1946 Venice Film Festival, and winner of the audience-driven Picturegoer Award for Best Actor (Robinson) and Actress (Bennett), it did not receive any recognition from the major U.S. awards bodies.

Lang rose to prominence with the 1926 German science-fiction film Metropolis and reached his height of acclaim with the 1931 thriller M, starring Peter Lorre as a child murderer. His first Hollywood film was 1936’s Fury starring Spencer Tracy as a man who is framed for a crime that he didn’t commit who then fakes his own death in a fire to incriminate his enemies. The revenge theme would reach its zenith in Lang’s work with The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street.

Robinson plays a middle-aged milquetoast driven to murder Bennett in both films. The difference is that The Woman in the Window chickens out with a weak ending in which it all turns out to have been a dream. There is no chickening out in Scarlet Street in which Bennett’s femme fatale is an obvious prostitute and boyfriend Duryea is obviously her pimp. Her murder and the subsequent framing of Duryea for the murder Robinson committed is very real this time. The censors’ objections were not so much that Bennett was playing a prostitute or that Robinson got away with killing her while an innocent man is convicted for the crime, but for the number of times Robinson plunged the knife into Bennett. A simple cut to the number of thrusts of the knife resolved the issue with the censors.

The Kino Lorber release contains both the 4K UHD disc with two separate commentaries and the standard Blu-ray disc which also includes trailers for a number of Kino Lorber’s films noir.

Also newly available from Kino Lorber is Witness for the Prosecution Special Editon Blu-ray.

The reissue of Billy Wilder’s 1957 film version of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution is the same transfer as Kino Lorber’s 2014 release. What makes it a special edition is the inclusion of a commentary track by film historian Joseph McBride, author of Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge.

The commentary, while very well done, doesn’t tell us anything that most of us don’t already know about Christie’s story and play or Wilder’s career, but could prove invaluable to someone not familiar with one or the other.

Wilder had not made a film from an original script since 1951’s Ace in the Hole, which met with mixed reviews from the critics. Subsequent films, such as Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Spirit of St. Louis, and Love in the Afternoon, were based on previously produced material as were Witness for the Prosecution and Some Like It Hot, which led to his return to original material with 1960’s The Apartment.

The one thing Wilder insisted on doing before agreeing to adapting and directing Christe’s play, which is set in 1952, was injecting comedy into the deadly serious murder mystery about a World War II veteran with an older German wife who is arrested and tried for the murder of an elderly admirer. The entire set-up at the beginning of the film about his barrister’s heart attack and disapproving nurse was written to do exactly that. The nurse was not a character in the play, which starred Francis L. Sullivan in the role played in the film by Charles Laughton. It was written for Laughton’s wife, Elsa Lanchester.

Billed above Laughton were Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich as the suspect and wife who were, like Gene Lyons and Patricia Jessel who played their roles on stage, 13 years apart with the woman being the older – 33 and 46 on stage, 43 and 56 on screen. Lyons had played the younger version of Power’s character in 1938’s In Old Chicago the same year he played the younger version of James Stewart in Of Human Hearts.

The only performer from the play to repeat their role in the film was Una O’Connor as the murder victim’s maid. O’Connor had played Power’s mother in Lloyd’s of London and Laughton’s mother in This Land Is Mine. She also shared the screen with Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein.

Extras include the previously released discussion on the film between Wilder and Volker Schlondorff.

Warner Archive has released Vincente Minnelli’s debut film, 1943’s Cabin in the Sky on Blu-ray.

Commentary for the musical is transported from the original DVD featuring Black Cultural Scholar Todd Boyd and Film Historian Drew Casper with assist from Eddie “Rochester” Anderson’s widow and daughter, and briefly, Lena Horne.

Ethel Waters is pure magic recreating her stage role of the long-suffering wife of gambler Rochester in the role played on stage by Dooley Wilson. Lena Horne has the role of the bad girl created by Katherine Dunham.

Boyd’s criticism of the film’s dressing the good guys in white and the bad guys in black may be valid as is his description of the film’s main characters as stereotypical, but he seems too harsh on Louis Armstrong, Mantan Moreland, and Willie Best as disciples of the devil and has no idea who legends Rex Ingram (The Thief of Bagdad), Kenneth Spencer (the 1945 revival of Show Boat), and John Bubbles (who taught Fred Astaire to tap dance) are, repeatedly referring to them by their character’s names. He didn’t dare put down cultural icons Waters and Horne.

No one has ever improved upon Waters’ interpretation of “Taking a Chance on Love,” which she introduced in the stage version, or the Oscar-nominated “Happiness Is a Thing called Joe,” which she introduced on screen.

Happy viewing.