I watched Scarlet Street (1945), a famous Noir movie. Chris Cross, a bank cashier, goes down a different street than he usually does after work and finds a woman getting beat up by a man. Chris runs over, hits the man with his umbrella, and saves the girl. The girl (Kitty) entertains Chris for a time as a thank you, and tries to get to know him. Both Chris and Kitty makes huge assumptions about each other which leads to many twists and turns and ultimately both their downfalls. The ending is definitely noir, but there's a few moments in the movie that seemed a bit off to me. Maybe its the style of story telling back in the 40s, or maybe it was just the writers way of getting things to happen, but there were 3 moments with Chris that seemed like it was either out of character or was being too naive for a 40+ year old and 1 with Kitty that seemed blatantly obvious but she just ignores it or chooses not to see it.
Spoiler:
1) Maybe I'm just cynical but the way Kitty talks to Chris at the bar when the first met would have tipped me off, drunk or not, that this woman doesn't like you, but is just being nice.
2) No one, in their right mind, would let someone else take credit for their art, especially if it was lucrative. The fact that Chris went along with this farce felt forced, or maybe his impostor syndrome and lack of self confidence is just that bad.
3) The murder seems out of character for Chris at that point. Maybe if we saw him have a temper, or yell at Kitty or something to make him commit the murder, it would have felt more authentic than just being insulted by the "woman he loves," which he puts up with enough at home with his own toxic relationship. Maybe while she was insulting him we could also hear, in Chris' mind his wife yelling at him from earlier too and we just see him snap. That would have felt more believable.
4) It was pretty plain to Kitty that Johnny wasn't really interested in her, and was just stringing her along to get money and sex out of her. It was pretty obvious, but I guess love is blind and she loved Johnny so much it blinded her from it. Maybe she was concussed since the movie makes it pretty clear he beats her on the regular and she seems to think that's normal, even though her roommate tells her its anything but normal. Then again I may be calling the kettle black here.End of spoilers
The twists in the movie were pretty fun and felt unexpected but were all well foreshadowed. It was entertaining, but the ending is bitter for pretty much everyone involved. Our protagonist is left haunted and ruined by the end of the film. Whats interesting is there were so many times along the way to ruination that you, as the audience, could see Chris or even Kitty's "happily ever after" ending just around the corner. But they kept making one bad choice after another making their own situations worse and worse. It really snowballed.
