The 1945 film noir directed by Fritz Lang that features a painter obsessed with a woman is Scarlet Street. Edward G. Robinson plays Christopher “Chris” Cross, a mild-mannered cashier and amateur painter who falls for Kitty March, played by Joan Bennett.
Kitty mistakenly believes Chris is a successful professional artist. She and her boyfriend, Johnny Prince, exploit his infatuation by pretending that Kitty created his paintings. The deception draws Chris into theft, fraud, and eventually murder, turning his romantic obsession into a bleak story of manipulation and moral collapse.
Scarlet Street reunited Lang with Robinson, Bennett, and Dan Duryea after their earlier collaboration on The Woman in the Window (1944). Both films share noir themes and similar casting, but Scarlet Street is based on the French novel La Chienne and ultimately offers an even more pessimistic portrait of desire and guilt.
A common mix-up is The Woman in the Window, which also stars Robinson and Bennett and involves a dangerous attraction. In Scarlet Street, however, the central figure is specifically an amateur painter whose work is stolen and passed off under Kitty’s name.