The emancipation of women early in the twentieth century was greeted with alarm in "The Way of All Flesh" (1927), now lost but remade in 1940, and "The Blue Angel" (1930), remade in 1959. "La Chienne" was made in 1931, then remade as "Scarlet Street" (1945). These films were remade in part because they were paradigms of a genre that warned about the increasing power of women. In comedy, this subject was well handled in the farces of Laurel and Hardy, especially "Sons of the Desert" (1933). "La Chienne" is a somewhat pedestrian melodrama, with pretensions to tragedy, bogged down with scenes involving the criminal justice system. Introduced to the audience by a puppet, who describes it as a "stirring social drama," it offers no sympathetic characters. Unlike "The Blue Angel" or "The Way of All Flesh," there is an element of the larcenous in the main character, who begins the drama by being faithless to his harridan of a wife. We can see why he would cheat on her and his employers, but the fact is that he cheats. His dilemma are not terribly "stirring."
Review of La Chienne
